The Executed God Quotes

“Whites generally are unable or unwilling to acknowledge how structural patterning generates white bias and responsibility for that structural patterning. Perhaps it is Mumia Abu-Jamal who again has deftly and complexly summarized the phenomenon of viciously racist bias in relation to African American experience of “criminal justice.” Contemplating Pennsylvania’s death row population which was 60 percent black at the time of his writing in a state where blacks make up only 11 percent of the population, Abu-Jamal reflects: Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.[94] Hence, we have the prison house and criminal justice structures as a bastion of white racism, displaying severe racial disparities, unequally disseminating terror and group loss for racialized groups in the US. It is a bitter fruit of the nation’s legacy of four centuries of slavery in North America, of the Jim Crow rollback of Reconstruction that often was reinforced by lynching practices. Some of today’s prisons are, in fact, built on sites of former slave plantations.[95] More importantly, prisons today are institutions that preserve a white society marked by white dominance and the confinement of nonwhite bodies, especially black bodies, exposing those bodies to commodification, immobilization, and disintegration.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“At its best, the expression crucified God reminds us that the power of all life, God, faces and suffers some of the worst that a creature can endure and emerges with newfound power, strength, and hope. What is sacralized or made holy is not suffering but the facing and endurance of suffering with hope and life.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Mark’s story of Jesus’ last days . . . is an intensely political drama, filled with conspiratorial backroom deals and covert action, judicial manipulation and prisoner exchange, torture and summary execution . . . And we do well not to forget that this very narrative of arrest, trial and torture is still lived out by countless political prisoners around the world today. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us.” With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one’s life taken, shaken out, by what I have term “the theatrics of state terror.” Wideman’s”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“By 2001, United States police violence and brutality had been roundly denounced, decried, and documented by Amnesty International and others as out of compliance with international law. United”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The crucified God takes believers on a journey into earth, into its pain and suffering, and finds in that journey not the holiness of pain but the wonder of life's power to persist and transform. The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth's humanity, which has been abandoned, rejected, and despised, the people who know life amid their struggle.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor , The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Churches today in the United States—liberal, as well as conservative and fundamentalist ones—seem often today more like a Christendom that is compliant with U.S. imperial designs and its carceral state.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“American slaves and their descendants have taken the texts of the bible in every sense of the word: embraced them, endured them, seized them, stolen them, caught them and captured them. Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Such a liberating transformation in and against Lockdown America is “spectral,” to use a term from my previous writings.[5] By that I mean that the counter-theatric to state terror makes demands. It is a spectral haunting of the suffering present. It makes demands and cultivates expectations that often make repressive powers tremble. For the repressed, though, this specter is laden with promise and hope. What does this spectral liberation look like?”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“A counter-theatric to state terror is an effective militant practice toward this end. This is “radical love” in the sense foregrounded by Cornel West, which bases its challenging love of the enemy not just upon the enemy’s needs, but upon an advocacy and fight for “the unloved,”[4] for the oppressed who need effective techniques and institutions of justice into which they can be liberated.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“There is no life for the enemy apart from what makes life and justice for those they oppress. Love of the enemy animated by Thurman’s “vital content” means putting an end to the system of death which enemies create, inhabit, and by which they maintain structures afflicting oppressed peoples.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“I am claiming that the making of life for the oppressed is a love of the enemy in the sense that the enemy is challenged to come out of prevailing systems of death to embrace, support, and enter into what makes for life and justice for the oppressed and ultimately for all.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique for the oppressed . . . It was upon the anvil of the Jewish community’s relations with Rome that Jesus hammered out the vital content of his concept of love for one’s enemy. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Because the United States still recycles white supremacist proclivities and practices, this is not just a sacrifice of “the poor.” It is particularly a sacrifice of the racially stigmatized poor. This is evident not only by the disproportionate suffering of blacks, Latinos/as, American Indians, and Asian- and Arab-Americans in U.S. prisons. It is dramatized also abroad by the peoples of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who long have been subject to U.S. racist assumptions that operate at the highest levels of government, and often pervade the U.S. body politic generally. Evidence of white supremacy in U.S. policy formulation has been repeatedly documented from U.S. dealings with nations of the global South continents.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“In sum, Lockdown America is not just a U.S. problem. It is a problem, also, of international political economy and U.S. global presumption and power. With Lockdown America, then, we cannot just debate national “crime and punishment” issues. The rise of Lockdown America is not simply an experiment by well-intentioned leaders on how best to deal with “crime” and our “criminal element.” We are not simply witnessing fed-up Americans suffering so-called compassion fatigue, who now over the decades have agreed to hand over more than two million of their citizens and residents to incarceration. Nor are we witnessing some institutionalized “tough love” that is part of some new moral vision insisting that U.S. citizens take “responsibility” for their own lives or face the punitive consequences. No, Lockdown America—its mass incarceration, militarized police repression, and state-sanctioned execution policy—services the dissemination of state terror, functioning to maintain the power of an economic and political elite in the U.S. that has been concentrating wealth within its control over the past decades.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“With the ending of Black Reconstruction in America at the forefront of his mind and heart, Du Bois nevertheless could mourn a whole world’s suffering: Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“With the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex working together in these ways there is a continuous, intensifying coordination of power between Lockdown America at home and imperial Pax Americana abroad. We need to feel these connections conceptually and viscerally, as did W. E. B. Du Bois in his time, because it surfaces not only coordinated powers of domination but a network of shared suffering by those exploited at home and abroad. When in the 1930s Du Bois surveyed the way industrial classes had destroyed post-Civil War Black Reconstruction in America, indeed enabling white power to be resurgent again inside the U.S., Du Bois was able also to perceive (and feel) how it also consolidated a structural violence abroad. While lamenting the devastation at home he thus lifted a lament, too, for multiple peoples abroad, for those he termed “the darker nations.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Wacquant’s book, The Prisons of Poverty, details much more than a simple sharing of prison and policing equipment. Of greater significance, perhaps, is the U.S. export of its “Penal Common Sense,” a “transatlantic diffusion” of the carceral state’s mode of rule: destroying safety nets for vulnerable groups (“surplus populations”) and substituting the dragnets of prisons and policing.[132] This has found resonance even in Western Europe, traditionally a source of alternative thinking to the harsher penal conditions and ideologies long known in the U.S.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“As to ways the military industrial complex is “going national,” there is the militarization of U.S. police I discussed in chapter 1. While the police have always been militarized, some key developments of the early twenty-first century are of special note. In 2013, the Department of Defense donated $4.3 billion in surplus military equipment to U.S. police forces. This, again, is not new, since it is grounded in 1997 legislation establishing what is today termed “The 1033 Program” (formerly the 1208 Program), permitting the Secretary of Defense to transfer without charge excess military supplies and equipment to the local police. U.S. national law enforcement organizations are upfront about this as a current source.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Nullifying or “neutralizing” the work and effects of such dissidents and organizers of alternative social structures is a third way that carceral state terror protects a system of economic disparity.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Lockdown America, especially the mass incarceration and police violence that target poor communities of color, drive such leaders underground. Often, they have been murdered by the police. The Black Panther Party leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were murdered by Chicago police, together offer perhaps the most memorable case in point. The Philadelphia police bombing and shooting of MOVE Organization members is another example, as discussed at the outset of Part One of this book.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Third, Lockdown America through its carceral terror sustains structures of economic disparity by targeting the key leaders, key figures who are the “social dynamite” from dispossessed communities. There are always those who dissent, who mobilize and who become agents for change amid the extremities of social dispossession. These men and women show gifts for mobilizing change and for catalyzing others toward collective action. Their revolutionary work seeks to build alternative institutions to safeguard their people’s freedoms. Often these dream and work for a socialist future. In the Cold War era, the times were “hot” for such as these, reckoned and hunted as “communists” in that period of U.S. history. Today, they are often reckoned as “terrorists.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Even those most defiant in enduring prison—consider George Jackson in his letters from prison, Soledad Brother—continually emphasize that the prisons are “places controlled by absolute terror.”[110] If fear is fought off, as Jackson claims he does in order to guard his dignity, there is also a cost, which he forthrightly acknowledges: “I must rid myself of all sentiment and remove all possibility of love.”[111] Lockdown America state terror services an economic and political elite by unleashing the corrosive effects of fear in dispossessed communities.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Baldwin makes it clear that the man released back onto the streets is “afraid, in fact, to hit those streets,” and “to be free to confront his life.” He is left by prison “terrified . . . of what life may bring, is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Communities suffering a disproportionate number of returnees from prison are not just filled with predators and “super predators.” This supposition can become another mantra of white caricature of communities of color, and often is used to justify more systemic surveillance and police violence in those neighborhoods. It is more important to recall that even if some return as violent actors, just as many, or more, return as fearful and broken persons into those communities.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Second, carceral terror, by implanting fear in the incarcerated, often returns persons broken by fear into their communities. I stressed in the first edition of this book that systems of punitive terror create through brutal prison culture a certain number of predators that often return to the streets, increasing the vulnerabilities of poor neighborhoods.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Even when our carceral state locks away the truly violent offender, it is thereby hiding the social, political, and economic structural forces that are the genesis of such violence. Locking up the violent offender is a way to focus attention away from elites’ structural responsibility for generating the conditions of violence.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“First, perhaps most obviously, massive punitive force serves economic elite groups by rendering invisible the wreckage of capitalist modes of exploitation, moving aside what elites view as “social junk.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America