Below is the statement I penned articulating my support for the October 2014 Month of Resistance, sponsored by the “Stop Mass Incarceration Network.” I will be speaking on the same theme at one of the Major Panels for the National Lawyers Guild’s 2014 National Convention in Chicago, this weekend, Saturday, September 6, 2014, 10:30 pm. This is an important time, I believe, to reach out in all directions to link up with national groups, parties and movements to end the dissemination of terror at work in the US regime of power. You can find the list of other signatories, in the online statement of the Call.
Statement of Support for the Call for a Month of Resistance
to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and
the Criminalization of a Generation
by Mark Lewis Taylor
It is time for Christians and all peoples of faith and conscience to give our support and participation to the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. The police terror and its militarization, as brutally showcased in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, is no new thing. It is a form of state terror long institutionalized in U.S. prisons, anchored in U.S. history of slavery and lynching, and in capitalist exploitation. This state terror is recycled in the exploitation, stigmatization and expulsion of immigrant groups, and in ever new US wars, covert and overt, against what W. E.B. Du Bois termed the “darker nations.”
The time is long past due, to say No! Enough!– to resist and transform policing in this country, to halt the injustices of US military war-making (such as those supporting Israel in its “politicide” in Gaza today), and to end US mass incarceration.
This will require whole new approaches to building democracy and rule in this country. Now is the time to commit to the Month of Resistance, in spite of and because of current state officials’ willingness to criminalize nearly anyone in this generation who dissents to the state terror visited upon the poor, especially upon African- and Latino/a Americans, but increasingly Asian- and Arab-Americans, too – indeed, upon white dissenters as well. As Chris Hedges recently wrote when noting today’s collaboration of corporate and media elites with the surveillance industry and paramilitary forces, “Rise up, or die.”
Churches and Christians should be at the forefront of this movement. Alas, they all too often are stragglers to the rear – complicit at worst, silent at best. I, as one follower along the way of the crucified figure, Jesus of Nazareth, note again the solid historical point that if you were among the crucified – as Jesus was – you were a resister to imperial power, or seen as counter to it. Rome reserved crucifixion as the mode of death for the rebel, for transgressors of empire’s force.
Real followers of Jesus will step forward in this moment, and take up the long struggle, moving along the way of Jesus against imperial forces. Today, this means resistance to US racialized state terror, both on our nation’s streets and in US wars abroad. State terror in all its forms – whether as mass incarceration, war or militarized policing – is a flagrant abuse of justice, love and dignity. Let October of 2014 show a new rising of the churches, of all followers of Jesus, alongside and in collaboration with all peoples of conscience from all our traditions – so to make a new way in this country. One means of beginning this effort is to support – wherever you are and however you can – the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.