"In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. 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. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably 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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), p. 2
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Post-racial_America
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Post-racial America
8 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Post-racial America →
Related Quotes
"The universal body of the human without a race is already de facto occupied by the unmarked white body in narratives …"
"To be blind to color and colorism in this context is to license racial injustice and to ignore the historical traject…"
"This idea of a post-racial society was quite possibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever created. Because unlike…"
"Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn't enough to int…"
"The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes…"
"American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. ... Hand …"
"If ... the tax scheme allows enormous intergenerational wealth transfers within families, some families will maintain…"
"And who is more unjust than he who forges a lie against Allah? These will be brought before their Lord, and the witne…"
"And certainly We sent Moses with Our signs and a dear authority, To Pharaoh and his chiefs, but they followed the bid…"
"And We wronged them not but they wronged themselves. And their gods whom they called upon besides Allah availed them …"