(?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)
Mark Lewis Taylor

“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, 2nd Edition
Read more quotes from Mark Lewis Taylor


Share this quote:
Share on Twitter

Friends Who Liked This Quote

To see what your friends thought of this quote, please sign up!


This Quote Is From

The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition by Mark Lewis Taylor
73 ratings, average rating, 6 reviews
Open Preview

Browse By Tag