Top 200 Michelle Alexander Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born.”

— Michelle Alexander

152. “Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980 – an increase of 1,100 percent.”

— Michelle Alexander

153. “People of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.”

— Michelle Alexander

154. “Mandatory drug sentencing laws strip judges of their traditional role of considering all relevant circumstances in an effort to do justice in the individual case.”

— Michelle Alexander

155. “Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority. The new system of control is traceable, to a significant degree, to a massive bribe offered to state and local law enforcement by the federal government.”

— Michelle Alexander

156. “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

— Michelle Alexander

157. “Immunizing prosecutors from claims of racial bias and failing to impose any meaningful check on the exercise of their discretion in charging, plea bargaining, transferring cases, and sentencing has created an environment in which conscious and unconscious biases are allowed to flourish. Numerous studies have shown that prosecutors interpret and respond to identical criminal activity differently based on the race of the offender.”

— Michelle Alexander

158. “Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.”

— Michelle Alexander

159. “The problem with this abbreviated analysis is that violent crime is not responsible for mass incarceration. As numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuated over the years and bear little relationship to incarceration rates – which have soared during the past three decades regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down.23 Today violent crime rates are at historically low levels, yet incarceration rates continue to climb.”

— Michelle Alexander

160. “Our nation declared a war on people trapped in racially segregated ghettos – just at the moment their economies had collapsed – rather than providing community investment, quality education, and job training when work disappeared. Of course those communities are suffering from serious crime and dysfunction today. Did we expect otherwise? Did we think that, miraculously, they would thrive?”

— Michelle Alexander

161. “In an effort to address the rampant joblessness among black men labeled criminals, a growing number of advocates in recent years have launched Ban the Box campaigns.”

— Michelle Alexander

162. “Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order.”

— Michelle Alexander

163. “The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to them does not directly affect – and is scarcely noticed by – the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls.”

— Michelle Alexander

164. “This reality made it possible for conservatives to characterize the “liberal Democratic establishment” as being out of touch with ordinary working people – thus resolving one of the central problems facing conservatives: how to persuade poor and working-class voters to join in alliance with corporate interests and the conservative elite.”

— Michelle Alexander

165. “African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today.”

— Michelle Alexander

166. “The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our.”

— Michelle Alexander

167. “What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it.”

— Michelle Alexander

168. “In Virginia, for example, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carries a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428.”

— Michelle Alexander

169. “Most of these stops and searches are futile. It has been estimated that 95 percent of Pipeline stops yield no illegal drugs.”

— Michelle Alexander

170. “Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug.”

— Michelle Alexander

171. “The majority of black women are unmarried today, including 70 percent of professional black women.”

— Michelle Alexander

172. “Federal drug forfeiture laws are one reason, Blumenson and Nilsen note, “why state and federal prisons now confine large numbers of men and women who had relatively minor roles in drug distribution networks, but few of their bosses.”

— Michelle Alexander

173. “They “load up” defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and – here’s the kicker – to obtain testimony for a related case. Harsh sentencing laws encourage people to snitch.”

— Michelle Alexander

174. “As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.”26.”

— Michelle Alexander

175. “Have we unwittingly exaggerated the importance of individuals succeeding within pre-existing structures of power, and thereby undermined King’s call for a “complete restructuring” of our society? Have.”

— Michelle Alexander

176. “Unfortunately, a fairly consistent finding is that punitiveness and hostility almost always increase when people are primed – even subliminally – with images or verbal cues associated with African Americans.”

— Michelle Alexander

177. “Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost exclusively among young white men and largely ignore drug crime among young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and then subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion? Can we imagine this happening while most black men landed decent jobs or trotted off to college? No, we cannot.”

— Michelle Alexander

178. “Perhaps most heroic are those who, upon release, launch social justice organizations that challenge the discrimination ex-offenders face and provide desperately needed support for those newly released from prison.”

— Michelle Alexander

179. “The New Jim Crow shatters this silence. Once you read it, you have crossed the Rubicon and there is no return to sleepwalking.”

— Michelle Alexander

180. “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 totem pole.”

— Michelle Alexander

181. “Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs – and some initially opposed it – but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner?”

— Michelle Alexander

182. “These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.”

— Michelle Alexander

183. “These mandatory minimum statutory schemes have transferred an enormous amount of power from judges to prosecutors. Now, simply by charging someone with an offense carrying a mandatory sentence of ten to fifteen years or life, prosecutors are able to force people to plead guilty rather than risk a decade or more in prison. Prosecutors admit that they routinely charge people with crimes for which they technically have probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could ever win in court.”

— Michelle Alexander

184. “As the Edsalls explain, “the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income distribution against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged – particularly for disadvantaged blacks – is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the responsibility of the larger society.”

— Michelle Alexander

185. “It is far more convenient to imagine that a majority of young African American men in urban areas freely chose a life of crime than to accept the real possibility that their lives were structured in a way that virtually guaranteed their early admission into a system from which they can never escape.”

— Michelle Alexander

186. “Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to stop and search them. As long as you give “consent,” the police can stop, interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all.”

— Michelle Alexander

187. “In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.”

— Michelle Alexander

188. “These rules have made it possible for law enforcement agencies to boost dramatically their rates of drug arrests and convictions, even in communities where drug crime is stable or declining.33 But that is not all. These rules have also guaranteed racially discriminatory results. The reason is this: Drug-law enforcement is unlike most other types of law enforcement.”

— Michelle Alexander

189. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities.”

— Michelle Alexander

190. “One notable example is the successful challenge led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to a racist drug sting operation in Tulia, Texas. The 1999 drug bust incarcerated almost 15 percent of the black population of the town, based on the uncorroborated false testimony of a single informant hired by the sheriff of Tulia.”

— Michelle Alexander

191. “These new legal rules have ensured that anyone, virtually anywhere, for any reason, can become a target of drug-law enforcement activity.”

— Michelle Alexander

192. “Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson embraced the antipoverty rhetoric with great passion, calling for an “unconditional war on poverty,” in his State of the Union Address in January 1964. Weeks later he proposed to Congress the Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964. The.”

— Michelle Alexander

193. “Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown.”

— Michelle Alexander

194. “Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.”

— Michelle Alexander

195. “At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.”

— Michelle Alexander

196. “Equally important, there must be a change within the culture of law enforcement. Black and brown people in ghetto communities must no longer be viewed as the designated enemy, and ghetto communities must no longer be treated like occupied zones.”

— Michelle Alexander

197. “In so doing, the Court made clear to all lower courts that, from now on, the Fourth Amendment should place no meaningful constraints on the police in the War on Drugs. No one needs to be informed of their rights during a stop or search, and police may use minor traffic stops as well as the myth of “consent” to stop and search anyone they choose for imaginary drug crimes, whether or not any evidence of illegal drug activity actually exists.”

— Michelle Alexander

198. “Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite.”

— Michelle Alexander

199. “Under the new law, drug busts motivated by the desire to seize cash, cars, homes, and other property are still perfectly legal.”

— Michelle Alexander

200. “The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.”

— Michelle Alexander