Top 200 Michelle Alexander Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The New Jim Crow shatters this silence. Once you read it, you have crossed the Rubicon and there is no return to sleepwalking. You are now awakened to a dark and ugly reality that has been in place for decades and that is continuous with the racist underside of American history from the advent of slavery onward.”

— Michelle Alexander

53. “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

54. “So herein lies the paradox and predicament of young black men labeled criminals. A war has been declared on them, and they have been rounded up for engaging in precisely the same crimes that go largely ignored in middle-and upper-class white communities – possession.”

— Michelle Alexander

55. “Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods.”

— Michelle Alexander

56. “Poor people of color, like other Americans – indeed like nearly everyone around the world – want safe streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that ghetto families do not, in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their young men is, quite simply, racist. It.”

— Michelle Alexander

57. “The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.”

— Michelle Alexander

58. “You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care.”

— Michelle Alexander

59. “Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality, solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the death penalty.”

— Michelle Alexander

60. “Back in the 1980s and 90s, Democratic and Republican politicians leaned heavily on racial stereotypes of “crack heads,” “crack babies,” “super-predators,” and “welfare queens,” to mobilize public support for the War on Drugs, a “get-tough” movement, and a prison-building boom. Today, the rhetoric has changed, but the game remains the same.”

— Michelle Alexander

61. “What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief – despite all evidence to the contrary – that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class.”

— Michelle Alexander

62. “Race had become, yet again, a powerful wedge, breaking up what had been a solid liberal coalition based on economic interests of the poor and the working and lower-middle classes.”

— Michelle Alexander

63. “What a growing number of sociologists have found ought to be common sense: by locking millions of people out of the mainstream legal economy, by making it difficult or impossible for people to find housing or feed themselves, and by destroying familial bonds by warehousing millions for minor crimes, we make crime more – not less – likely in the most vulnerable communities.”

— Michelle Alexander

64. “Individuals are forced to make choices in an environment they did not choose. They would surely prefer to have a broader array of good opportunities. The question we should be asking – not instead of but in addition to questions about penal policy – is whether the denizens of the ghetto are entitled to a better set of options, and if so, whose responsibility it is to provide them.”

— Michelle Alexander

65. “Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ’hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the efforts may.”

— Michelle Alexander

66. “I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.”

— Michelle Alexander

67. “Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent.33.”

— Michelle Alexander

68. “The shift to a general attitude of ‘toughness’ toward problems associated with communities of color began in the 1960s, when the gains and goals of the Civil Rights movement began to require real sacrifices on the part of white Americans, and conservative politicians found they could mobilize white racial resentment by vowing to crack down on crime.”

— Michelle Alexander

69. “Beginning in the 1970s, researchers found that racial attitudes – not crime rates or likelihood of victimization – are an important determinant of white support for “get tough on crime” and antiwelfare measures. 90 Among whites, those expressing the highest degree of concern about crime also tend to oppose racial reform, and their punitive attitudes toward crime are largely unrelated to their likelihood of victimization.”

— Michelle Alexander

70. “Here, in America, the idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery – as well as the extermination of American Indians – with the ideals of freedom preached by whites in the new colonies.”

— Michelle Alexander

71. “The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerrilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States – drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the War on Drugs, it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks that were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.5.”

— Michelle Alexander

72. “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

73. “Imprisonment, they say, now creates far more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployables.28.”

— Michelle Alexander

74. “The history of racial caste in the United States would end with the Civil War if the idea of race and racial difference had died when the institution of slavery was put to rest. But during the four centuries in which slavery flourished, the idea of race flourished as well. Indeed, the notion of racial difference – specifically the notion of white supremacy – proved far more durable than the institution that gave birth to it.”

— Michelle Alexander

75. “The criminalization and demonization of black men has turned the black community against itself, unraveling community and family relationships, decimating networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and self-hate experienced by the current pariah caste.”

— Michelle Alexander

76. “The fact that police are legally allowed to engage in a wholesale roundup of nonviolent drug offenders does not answer the question why they would choose to do so, particularly when most police departments have far more serious crimes to prevent and solve. Why would police prioritize drug-law enforcement?”

— Michelle Alexander

77. “Racial indifference and blindness – far more than racial hostility – form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems.”

— Michelle Alexander

78. “In other words, consent searches are valuable tools for the police only because hardly anyone dares to say no.”

— Michelle Alexander

79. “The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years. By contrast, in other developed countries around the world, a first-time drug offense would merit no more than six months in jail, if jail time is imposed at all.”

— Michelle Alexander

80. “By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans – or one in every 31 adults – were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.”

— Michelle Alexander

81. “As a crime reduction strategy, mass incarceration is an abysmal failure. It is largely ineffective and extraordinarily expensive.”

— Michelle Alexander

82. “The extreme poverty that plagued blacks due to their legally sanctioned inferior status was largely invisible to whites – so long as whites remained in their own neighborhoods, which they were inclined to do. Racial segregation rendered black experience largely invisible to whites, making it easier for whites to maintain racial stereotypes about black values and culture. It also made it easier to deny or ignore their suffering.”

— Michelle Alexander

83. “When black youth find it difficult or impossible to live up to these standards – or when they fail, stumble, and make mistakes, as all humans do – shame and blame is heaped upon them. If only they had made different choices, they’re told sternly, they wouldn’t be sitting in a jail cell; they’d be graduating from college. Never mind that white children on the other side of town who made precisely the same choices – often for less compelling reasons – are in fact going to college.”

— Michelle Alexander

84. “A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.”

— Michelle Alexander

85. “According to the Cato Institute, in 1997 alone, the Pentagon handed over more than 1.2 million pieces of military equipment to local police departments.36 Similarly, the National Journal reported that between January 1997 and October 1999, the agency handled 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from over eleven thousand domestic police agencies in all fifty states.”

— Michelle Alexander

86. “More recently, civil rights groups around the country have helped to launch legal attacks and vobramf campaigns against felon disenfranchisement laws and have strenuously opposed discriminatory crack sentencing laws and guidelines, as well as “zero tolerance” policies that effectively funnel youth of color from schools to jails.”

— Michelle Alexander

87. “According to the Court, whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race when making traffic stops is irrelevant to a consideration of whether their conduct is “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment.”

— Michelle Alexander

88. “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. Nevertheless, black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than white men.19 The racial bias inherent in the drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men.”

— Michelle Alexander

89. “Self-hate is also part of the reason people in her neighborhood do not speak to each other about the impact of incarceration on their families and their lives.”

— Michelle Alexander

90. “Although it is common to think of poverty and joblessness as leading to crime and imprisonment, this research suggests that the War on Drugs is a major cause of poverty, chronic unemployment, broken families, and crime today. Todd.”

— Michelle Alexander

91. “The safest communities are not the ones with the most police, prisons, or electronic monitors, but the ones with quality schools, health care, housing, plentiful jobs, and strong social networks that allow families not merely to survive but to thrive.”

— Michelle Alexander

92. “Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. We should hope not for a colorbind 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

93. “Finally, we must admit, out loud, that it was because of race that we didn’t care much what happened to “those people” and imagined the worst possible things about them. The fact that our lack of care and concern may have been, at times, unintentional or unconscious does not mitigate our crime-if we refuse, when given the chance, to make amends.”

— Michelle Alexander

94. “Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws – particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences – that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime.”

— Michelle Alexander

95. “Tens of thousands of poor people go to jail every year without ever talking to a lawyer, and those who do meet with a lawyer for a drug offense often spend only a few minutes discussing their case and options before making a decision that will profoundly affect the rest of their lives.”

— Michelle Alexander

96. “The “social pathologies” of the poor, particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief arrangements. Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.”

— Michelle Alexander

97. “1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 I’m 106 white men.”

— Michelle Alexander

98. “The most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have consistently succeeded in implementing new racial caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.”

— Michelle Alexander

99. “In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.”

— Michelle Alexander

100. “Racial attitudes – not crime rates or likelihood of victimization – are an important determinant of white support for ‘get tough on crime’ and antiwelfare measures.”

— Michelle Alexander