Michelle Alexander Quotes

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

The denial of racism is a form of racism itself.

White supremacy is not just a social arrangement: it is a race-based faith.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

We simply cannot insist that race should not matter when everything in life argues that it does.

The trend of psychology, education, anthropology, and social science is toward environmentalism in the explanation of group differences, which means that the racial beliefs which defended caste are being torn away. It also means, by implication, that the white majority group in power is accused of being the cause of the Negro's deficiencies and unhappiness.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition.

I believe racism has killed more people than speed, heroin, or cancer, and will continue to kill until it is no more.

I think that what people have failed to talk about is white supremacy.

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

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

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.