Arson

“What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: a new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness. Hundreds of thousands of people of color are swept into this system and released every year, yet we rationalize the systematic discrimination and exclusion and turn a blind eye to the suffering. Our collective denial is not merely an inconvenient fact; it is a major stumbling block to public understanding of the role of race in our society, and it sharply limits the opportunities for truly transformative collective action.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“There is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis­tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys­tem of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness