Michelle Alexander Quotes

It is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.

I don't want my kids going through what I went through - police stopping you, searching you and all that malarkey.

It's unfortunate that the entire country is a racist country.We're living in a country that discriminates, and has certain racist tendencies.

Young black men are guilty of criminal behavior not because of the alleged crimes they might commit but because they are the product of a collective imagination paralyzed by the racism of a white supremacist culture they can only view them as a dangerous nightmare.

The international community cannot accept that whole communities are marginalized because of the color of their skin. People of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education. Such fundamental wrongs have a long and terrible history.

So many people representing different sections of our community are taken down one way or another. The system was designed to break us down. You think it isn’t true? The three-strike rule is to break down a black man.

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

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

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

It is more dangerous to be black in America. It's both more dangerous because of the crime ... but it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don't respect you or where you could easily get killed.

The commission of crime is not randomly or evenly distributed in our society. If you wanted to remove everything correlated with race, you couldn’t use anything.

Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled.

Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.

It doesn't even feel like racism is real. It just feels like the weirdest ploy, like we're just being had on so many levels. It's even kind of funny when you think about it. A reason not to like someone is 'because you're black.' C'mon, man. How dumb is that?

I can identify many different experiences that I've had over the course of my life and things that I've witnessed where it seemed that black men, specifically me or someone else may have got the, you know, different treatment than somebody else would in that same situation.

If you are a black person growing up in America, chances are pretty good that you have experienced the police pulling you over in front of your mother's house because you 'had a headlight out.'

As a black man who doesn't know another black man who hasn't had strange run-ins with police officers, it's impossible for us not to think about whether that could have been us - based on our country, based on our culture, based on our past experiences.

You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

This is the United States of America and unfortunately, race still matters to a lot of people. The evil head of racism doesn't hide, it sticks its head up.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.

Millions of people of color still experience racism daily.

I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.