Michelle Alexander Quotes

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

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

But in my life, the vast majority of people that have really afforded me the opportunity to succeed were white folks.

Segregation of schools is no accident.

A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father's generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.

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.

Black girls are punished, many times violently so, for questioning and challenging authority, which is something that is often celebrated and encouraged as a sign of intelligence and critical thinking in white boys.

Too often, the very institutions that are supposed to protect and serve our community have instead failed people of color, specifically our black community.

I am certain that my white colleagues, when faced with an emergency situation, wouldn't think twice about calling the police. This, however, may not be the case for their black and Latino students.

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.

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

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

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.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.

All whites benefitted from American slavery.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

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