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Michelle Alexander Quotes about Opportunity

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Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public

Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Michelle Alexander
Educational, Men, Opportunity
"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". Book by Michelle Alexander, January 5, 2010.

The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.

Michelle Alexander
War, Unique, Opportunity
Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.54, The New Press

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.

Michelle Alexander
Educational, Opportunity, African American
Source: www.truth-out.org

The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they're in silos. But the reality is we're not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we're wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system.

Michelle Alexander
Meaningful, Kids, Opportunity
Source: www.truth-out.org

... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.

Michelle Alexander
Meaningful, Opportunity, Experts

The so-called resistance is very broad and we don't agree on everything, but there's a moment of opportunity when people are paying attention. It's time for us to really get serious about political education and about our own moral education in this moment, and to seize this opportunity to organize and be in deep dialogue with a whole lot of people who never even thought about being politically engaged or active before. There's real hope there and real opportunity.

Michelle Alexander
Real, Opportunity, People
Source: www.truth-out.org

I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests - taking to the streets - but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range.

Michelle Alexander
Writing, School, Opportunity
Source: www.truth-out.org

We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity.

Michelle Alexander
Opportunity, Color, Empowering
Source: www.truth-out.org

Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could.

Michelle Alexander
Ghetto, Opportunity, Color
Source: www.truth-out.org

We can't just assume that this resistance is going to produce the kinds of candidates or the kinds of parties that will truly honor people of all colors, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, from every nation and every faith and every gender, unless we do the work in our own communities of organizing and being in deep dialogue with one another across all forms of difference. It's my hope that we'll seize this opportunity and not let the moment pass.

Michelle Alexander
Party, Opportunity, People
Source: www.truth-out.org

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