Tonight we’re at @BowdoinCollege for the Annual Commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., talking with author of @thenewjimcrow, Michelle Alexander.
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“The work of Dr. King isn’t just unfinished, it has barely begun.” - Michelle Alexander
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“The King holiday is an opportunity for us to ask ourselves ‘How can I be more courageous?’ ‘How can I show up with more solidarity?’” -Michelle Alexander
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“My passion around mass incarceration really emerged once I was a civil rights lawyer at the
@ACLU. It wasn’t until I reckoned w/ the scale that young black males were being vacuumed out of their communities for the kinds of minor offenses I saw all the time on college campuses.”Show this thread -
“I don’t subscribe to the notion that ‘For those people it makes sense to lock them up in cages’...Treating people worse than a dog in the pound is not a rational way of addressing people who commit violence.” -Michelle Alexander
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“People who commit violence have often first survived violence...Exposing them to more trauma and expecting them to be better? That’s just nuts.” -Michelle Alexander
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“90% of victims say they would rather perpetrators go through a restorative justice program. Most people want more than just retribution. They want to make sure nothing like what happens to them ever happens again.” -Michelle Alexander
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“The system of mass incarceration and mass deportation depends on us not caring about people who have been labeled ‘criminal.’ We can’t afford to live in a society that allows us to think of anyone as ‘Us vs. Them.” -Michelle Alexander
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Speaking of the need to care about one another: “None of us would want our children to be locked in a cage. None of us would want that for anyone they knew. But for them, it’s okay?” -Michelle Alexander
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“We are going to have to be willing to put our own selves at risk. I don’t think my book would have done what it did if it weren’t for the people in Ferguson standing up and for the people across the country who said ‘I’m going to stand up too.’” -Michelle Alexander
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“The biggest lie we buy into is that we have no power. We have ENORMOUS power.” -Michelle Alexander
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“The number of people in prison skyrocketed, regardless of whether crime was going up or down...because we decided to get tough on ‘Them.’” -Michelle Alexander
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“The Southern Strategy was a deliberate strategy to play on the fear of poor, white communities by promising to ‘get tough’ on a racialized ‘other.’ And a wave of punitiveness swept the country, resulting in a quintupling of our prison population in a very short amount of time.”
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“Everyone knows that the safest communities aren’t the ones with lots of police and prisons. They are the ones with good schools,” etc. -Michelle Alexander
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End of conversation
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