Michelle Alexander Quotes

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

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

… a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through

Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

On the field, blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it and we go back to the back of the bus again.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin' hell, but as long as they ain't free, I ain't free.

Negro life in Washington is a promise rather than a fulfillment.

If this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-American didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

The dysfunction of African-Americans is directly related to the fact that African-Americans as a racial group are no longer needed to bolster the economy as they were in slavery days.

We know that there are people in our nation, black people, who are systematically being disenfranchised in a number of spheres in our lives.

Black people are experiencing a systemic disadvantage, and it goes back to slavery, which was not that long ago.

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

I think the African American community, the Latino community, the Native American communities have borne an unfair burden in the last century, and continue to.

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

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

Black people must address itself to the causes of poverty. That's oppression in this country.

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.

We [Blacks] wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.