Top 200 Michelle Alexander Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.”

— Michelle Alexander

2. “The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.”

— Michelle Alexander

3. “Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs.”

— Michelle Alexander

4. “There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.”

— Michelle Alexander

5. “The fate of millions of people – indeed the future of the black community itself – may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.”

— Michelle Alexander

6. “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

— Michelle Alexander

7. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

— Michelle Alexander

8. “One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11.”

— Michelle Alexander

9. “Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other.”

— Michelle Alexander

10. “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”

— Michelle Alexander

11. “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

— Michelle Alexander

12. “Since the nation’s founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.”

— Michelle Alexander

13. “Unable to drive, get a job, find housing, or even qualify for public benefits, many ex-offenders lose their children, their dignity, and eventually their freedom – landing back in jail after failing to play by rules that seem hopelessly stacked against them.”

— Michelle Alexander

14. “Mandatory sentencing laws are frequently justified as necessary to keep “violent criminals” off the streets, yet these penalties are imposed most often against drug offenders and those who are guilty of nonviolent crimes.”

— Michelle Alexander

15. “Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.”

— Michelle Alexander

16. “Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.”

— Michelle Alexander

17. “The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.”

— Michelle Alexander

18. “Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws – which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks – and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies.”

— Michelle Alexander

19. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

— Michelle Alexander

20. “Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion – transition – in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold. The adoption of the new system of control is never inevitable, but to date it has never been avoided.”

— Michelle Alexander

21. “The same drug that had been considered fearsome twenty years earlier, when associated with African Americans and Latinos, was refashioned as a relatively harmless drug when associated with whites.”

— Michelle Alexander

22. “Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer.64 Yet our nation’s public defender system is woefully inadequate.”

— Michelle Alexander

23. “Reva Siegel has dubbed “preservation through transformation,” is the process through which white privilege is maintained, though the rules and rhetoric change.”

— Michelle Alexander

24. “African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals.”

— Michelle Alexander

25. “If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.”

— Michelle Alexander

26. “The quotation commonly attributed to Nietzsche, that “there is no immaculate perception,” perfectly captures how cognitive schemas – thought structures – influence what we notice and how the things we notice get interpreted.”

— Michelle Alexander

27. “In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black man held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of all Southern elected officials were black. This is particularly extraordinary in light of the fact that fifteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the high water mark of the Civil Rights Movement – fewer than 8 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.”

— Michelle Alexander

28. “In any war, a tremendous amount of collateral damage is inevitable. Black and brown people are the principal targets in this war; white people are collateral damage.”

— Michelle Alexander

29. “The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race.”

— Michelle Alexander

30. “As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.”

— Michelle Alexander

31. “Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.”

— Michelle Alexander

32. “Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem.”

— Michelle Alexander

33. “Every system of control depends for its survival on the tangible and intangible benefits that are provided to those who are responsible for the system’s maintenance and administration.”

— Michelle Alexander

34. “Portugal, for example, responded to persistent problems of drug addiction and abuse by decriminalizing the possession of all drugs and redirecting the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention. Ten years later, Portugal reported that rates of drug abuse and addiction had plummeted, and drug-related crime was on the decline as well.”

— Michelle Alexander

35. “Tom Watson, a prominent Populist leader, in a speech advocating a union between black and white farmers: “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.”

— Michelle Alexander

36. “The churning of African Americans in and out of prisons today is hardly surprising, given the strong message that is sent to them that they are not wanted in mainstream society. In Frederick Douglass’s words, “Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.”

— Michelle Alexander

37. “Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.”

— Michelle Alexander

38. “We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love.”

— Michelle Alexander

39. “A new social consensus must be forged about race and the role of race in defining the basic structure of our society, if we hope ever to abolish the New Jim Crow. This new consensus must begin with dialogue, a conversation that fosters a critical consciousness, a key prerequisite to effective social action. This book is an attempt to ensure that the conversation does not end with nervous laughter.”

— Michelle Alexander

40. “The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is pure fiction. Drug trafficking occurs there, but it occurs everywhere else in America as well.”

— Michelle Alexander

41. “Today, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.”

— Michelle Alexander

42. “Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.”

— Michelle Alexander

43. “Drug raids conducted by SWAT teams are not polite encounters. In countless situations in which police could easily have arrested someone or conducted a search without a military-style raid, police blast into people’s homes, typically in the middle of the night, throwing grenades, shouting, and pointing guns and rifles at anyone inside, often including young children.”

— Michelle Alexander

44. “The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done.”

— Michelle Alexander

45. “Whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.”

— Michelle Alexander

46. “Any candid observer of American racial history must acknowledge that racism is highly adaptable. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.”

— Michelle Alexander

47. “Some federal judges, including conservative judges, have quit in protest of federal drug laws and sentencing guidelines. Face-to-face with those whose lives hang in the balance, they are far closer to the human tragedy occasioned by the drug war than the legislators who write the laws from afar.”

— Michelle Alexander

48. “The temptation is to insist that black men “choose” to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.”

— Michelle Alexander

49. “Eliminating ‘savages’ is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race – uncivilized savages – thus providing a justification for the extermination of the native peoples.”

— Michelle Alexander

50. “You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society, but you are not forgotten.”

— Michelle Alexander