Michelle Alexander Quotes About Discrimination

Quotes about: Discrimination

• 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 have scarcely more rights, and largely 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

  Educational, Men, Opportunity

  "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". Book by Michelle Alexander, January 5, 2010.

• Today 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. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons, and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Men, Cycling

  "Legal Scholar: Jim Crow Still Exists In America". "Fresh Air" with Dave Davies, www.npr.org. January 16, 2012.

• We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison - discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.

  Michelle Alexander

  Jobs, Jail, Rights

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.

  Michelle Alexander

  Space, Mainstream Society, Racism

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.58, The New Press

• Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. 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.

  Michelle Alexander

  Educational, Opportunity, African American

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.

  Michelle Alexander

  Law, People, Drug

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• For the rest of their lives, [black men] can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Black, Crow

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• In many large urban areas, the majority of working age African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. It is viewed as "normal" in ghetto communities to go to prison or jail.

  Michelle Alexander

  Ghetto, Men, Jail

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Color, Practice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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