Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander (born October 7, 1967) is an American writer, attorney, and civil rights activist. She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Since 2018, she has been an opinion columnist for the New York Times.

Alexander was born on October 7, 1967, in Chicago, Illinois, to an interracial couple, John Alexander and Sandra Alexander (née Huck) who were wed in 1965. She spent her early childhood in Stelle, Illinois until 1977, when the family moved to the San Francisco area, where her father worked as a salesman for IBM.

Alexander attended high school in Ashland, Oregon, with her younger sister, Leslie Alexander, who later became a professor of History and African American Studies and the author of 2008's African or American? Black Identity in New York City, 1784–1861.

Alexander earned a B.A. degree from Vanderbilt University, where she received a Truman Scholarship. She earned a J.D. degree from Stanford Law School.

Alexander served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California from 1998 until 2005, which led a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. She directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination.

Alexander was a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York from 2016 to 2021.

In 2018, she was hired as an opinion columnist at the New York Times. There she collaborated on a piece with Leslie Alexander entitled "Fear" which became a chapter in Nikole Hannah-Jones's "The 1619 Project."

Alexander published her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in 2010. In it, she argued that systemic racial discrimination in the United States resumed following the Civil Rights Movement, and that the resumption is embedded in the US war on drugs and other governmental policies and is having devastating social consequences. She considered the scope and impact of this to be comparable with that of the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book concentrated on the high rate of incarceration of African-American men for various crimes. Alexander wrote, "Race plays a major role—indeed, a defining role—in the current system, but not because of what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility—a feature it actually shares with its predecessors."