Opportunity Quotes by Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander

… 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.

Experts

Meaningful

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Color

Ghetto

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Opportunity

School

Writing

Michelle Alexander

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.

Educational

Men

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Kids

Meaningful

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Opportunity

People

Real

Michelle Alexander

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.

Opportunity

Unique

War

Michelle Alexander

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.

African American

Educational

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Color

Empowering

Opportunity

Michelle Alexander

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.

Opportunity

Party

People

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Timothy West

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Agency

America

Appreciation

Assuming

Bars

Believe

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Black Youth

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Book

Boys

Branded

Cages

California

Care

Caste System

Castes

Challenges

Children

Choices

Cities

Class

College

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Community

Corporations

Country

Couple

Crime

Criminals

Crow

Cycling

Data

Democrat

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Doe

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Dream

Drug

Drunk

Economic Recession

Educational

Empowering

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Expectations

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Eye

Failing

Fate

Father

Felons

Ghetto

Giving

Government

Groups

Growing Up

Half

Hands

Havens

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Home

Ideas

Innocent Man

Iran

Issues

Jail

Jim Crow Laws

Jobs

Judging

Justice

Kids

Kind

Law

Littles

Looks

Lying

Mainstream Society

Making Money

Marijuana

Mass

Mass Incarceration

Mean

Meaningful

Media

Men

Mistake

Mother

Movement

Needs

New York

Numbers

Odds

Opportunity

Order

Party

Past

Pay

People

Political

Powerful

Practice

Prevention

Prison

Prison Guards

Prison Population

Progress

Punishment

Race

Racism

Real

Reality

Reason

Records

Rights

Risk

Running

Russia

School

Sky

Social

Space

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Survival

Talking

Thinking

Today

Tools

Tough

Trying

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Unique

United States

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Vote

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White Man

Wire

Writing

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Opportunity Quotes by Michelle Alexander

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.

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.

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