Michelle Alexander Quotes

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of racial caste - if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.

In the black community, Trump's history of racial discrimination is deeply embedded.

So people thought once Obama got into office that racism was over with. But, what we ended up learning was that it just came more into the light.

Being of color in America by no means amounts to a constant barrage of negativity. However, unlike being white, being of color means one's race is a constant issue.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life, but with the product of these conditions, the Negro himself.

If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.

There's no such thing as racial, non-white supremacy.

There are so many - namely black and brown bodies - who have experienced a different America than what the mainstream American flag symbolizes.

The reality is that anti-black racism is a global phenomenon, and it looks different in each context, but if you look at the outcomes, if you listen and look at the experiences, you will see that it's clear, and it's happening across the globe.

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.

We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.