Michelle Alexander

In a 2019 opinion piece for The New York Times, written subsequent to the passing of the Ohio "Heartbeat Bill", Alexander wrote of being raped during her first semester of law school, becoming pregnant as a result, and then aborting the pregnancy.

In 2018, she was hired as an opinion columnist at The New York Times.

In the fall of 2015, all freshmen enrolled at Brown University read The New Jim Crow as part of the campus's First Readings Program initiated by the Office of the Dean of the College and voted on by the faculty.

The New Jim Crow was re-released in paperback in 2012. As of March 2012 it had been on The New York Times Best Seller list for six weeks and it also reached number 1 on the Washington Post bestseller list in 2012. The book has also been the subject of scholarly debate and criticism.

Alexander appeared in a 2012 documentary Hidden Colors 2: The Triumph of Melanin, in which she discussed the impact of mass incarceration in melanoid communities. Alexander said: "Today there are more African American adults, under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the Civil War began.

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." The New Jim Crow described how she believes oppressed minorities are "subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were". Alexander argued the harsh penalty of how "people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society—permanently—and also highlights the inequality presented from the fact that "blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men".

In 2002, Alexander married Carter Mitchell Stewart, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School. Stewart at the time was a senior associate at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, a San Francisco law firm, and later was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. They have three children. Her father-in-law is a former member of the board of directors of The New York Times.

Alexander served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the 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.

Michelle Alexander (born October 7, 1967) is a writer, civil rights advocate, and visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary (New York City). She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and its 2020 edition, and is an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

Alexander was born in Chicago, Illinois to an interracial couple, John Alexander and Sandra Alexander (Huck) who were wed in 1965. She attended high school in Ashland, Oregon with her younger sister, Dr. Leslie Alexander who is a professor of History and African American Studies, and is the author of 2008's African or American? Black Identity in New York City, 1784–1861.