Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black. Michelle Alexander
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. - Joseph Fort Newton
  2. There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. - Unknown
  3. Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. - George Gordon Byron
  4. Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth. - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
  5. Our love for our country is worth nothing if it deprives us of our sense of humanity, if it destroys positive consensus. - Janvier ChouteuChando
More Quotes By Michelle Alexander
  1. We can have no significant understanding of any culture unless we also know the silences that were intentionally created and guaranteed along with it.— Gerald Sider.
  2. The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility...
  3. Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as "mischief" and "insulting gestures" as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing.
  4. The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used...
  5. Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time....
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