Michelle Alexander Quotes

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

It is apparent, if you go back through our history, that the grand juries of the criminal justice system do not value black lives.

Listen, we've got one little ol' black president, and white folks are upset, but they've had 43.

The average white person now feels that anti-white bias is a bigger problem than other forms of racial discrimination.

When I reflect on the Colbert interview, it moved so quickly that what we didn't do was define white privilege, and I wish we had done that. White privilege is the benefit resulting from white being seen as the standard, regardless of gender and income.

There is a consciousness as an agent of one's own destiny as a person in America, there are things that can be done, there are advantages and benefits which exist that are directly related to - and even rest upon - white privilege.

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

New York white youth were killing victims; that was a 'sociological' problem. But when black youth killed somebody, the power structure was looking to hang somebody.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

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

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

If O.J. had been accused of killing his black wife, you would not have seen the same passion stirred up.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Clearly, the Obama presidency hasn't wiped out racial prejudices.

There was a while when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have to go through all this'.

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

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

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.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.