Michelle Alexander: Why She Kicks Ass

• She is an African-American civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar concentrating on race in the United States criminal justice system, racial profiling, racism in the United States, and other issues especially related to systematic discrimination against black and brown communities in the U.S.
• She is a Graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University, who has worked as a litigator at private law firms, including Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, in Oakland, California, where she specialized in plaintiff-side class action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination.
• She served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the Project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, coalition-building, and litigation; and spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement called the “Driving While Black/Brown [DWB] Campaign”.
• In recent years, she has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics.
• She is also the Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, arguing that systemic racial discrimination in the United States has resumed following the Civil Rights Movement’s gains.