Quotes from Michelle Alexander

Activists take the risks, while advocates are professional tinkerers with the system. What's necessary is for those who are advocates to support those who are activists and to envision themselves as activists.

I believe that Trayvon Martin's life might well have been spared if many of us who care about racial justice had raised our voices much, much sooner and much, much more loudly about the routine stereotyping and profiling of young black men and boys.

If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers, or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.

The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of racial caste - if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.

Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits - forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.

All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

I believe the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a very large swath of the American population, really wants to imagine that race and racial inequality is something we don't have to think about anymore, don't have to worry about anymore.

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

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.

We must muster the courage, we must find the will, we must do what is necessary to build a truly transformative movement that will end the history and cycle of caste in America.

Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.

We cannot 'fix' the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society.

More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

If there is any hope that we in America might one day overcome our own history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, and oppression and create a justice system that is truly a source of international pride rather than shame, I suspect Rwanda may have as much to teach us about what is required as any tour of a Norwegian prison.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our 'colorblind' society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure - the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'

The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth, and fame.

Our entire political system is financed by wealthy private interests buying politicians and making sure the rules are written in their favor.

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.