Home > Author > Dominique DuBois Gilliard

Dominique DuBois Gilliard QUOTES

Dominique DuBois Gilliard QUOTES

1 " While many have depicted the War on Drugs as a Republican initiative, the drug war was a bipartisan effort. This rhetoric of law and order deployed by politicians won elections nationwide, from races for local council seats to the presidency. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

2 " We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that—when it comes to nonviolent offenders—warrants medical interventions, not incarceration. Decades later, data unequivocally illustrates that this war has been a massive failure. It has not only failed to reduce violent crime, but arrest rates—throughout its tenure—have continuously ascended even when crime rates have descended. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

3 " Today, it is predicted that nationwide one in three black males and one in six Hispanic males will be incarcerated in their lifetime. We have come to accept this as natural. But why doesn’t our discipleship inspire us to interrogate this belief? "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

4 " The church must reckon with the reality that ever since black people were stolen from Africa and trafficked to this land, they have been dehumanized, abused, criminalized, incarcerated, exploited for profit, and governed in distinctively sinister ways. This oppression has been personal, institutional, systemic, and legislative. It has been authorized and sanctioned by our local, state, and federal government. As the church, do we have the wherewithal to confront the austere reality that our national economy has been subsidized by a criminal justice system that is, and has been, predicated on the exploitation of cheap labor extracted from poor, racially profiled people of color? "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

5 " While many have depicted the War on Drugs as a Republican initiative, the drug war was a bipartisan effort. This rhetoric of law and
order deployed by politicians won elections nationwide, from races for local council seats to the presidency. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

6 " Christians must join the freedom caravan and take part in the ongoing work of reimagining true justice. We can no longer wait until it
is socially expedient. We are called to be a prophetic presence in the world, not merely an echo chamber that resounds once there is no longer any social risk involved in speaking up. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

7 " Paul and Silas prophetically demonstrated that privilege is something Christians are called to steward, not exploit for selfish "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

8 " When injustice manifests itself in every aspect of a nation’s life, we necessarily infer that the structures of violence are being condoned by the authorities or by influential persons such as rulers, prophets, priests, and the wealthy. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

9 " As followers of Christ, we must ask what our faith calls us to in this unprecedented era of mass incarceration. Collectively and individually, we must contemplate what bearing witness to the gospel in this critical moment entails. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

10 " God wants us to hate what God hates. God invites us into a shared fury, but only the kind that we creatures can handle. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

11 " Historically, as unjust laws have brought death, oppression, and injustice, far too many Christians have acquiesced to a patriotic doctrine of unquestioning allegiance to law and order. I raise this point in part because it is so easy to forget that if Mary and Joseph had blindly followed the law, Jesus would have been executed at birth—as would have Moses. Jesus embodied God’s heart for restoration. Jesus came to save, redeem, and restore those who are separated from God and their community because of their sin. But Jesus also came to remove the stones of judgment from the hands of religious people who impede the path of restoration for those who have stumbled along the way. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

12 " In Rwanda, no one who comes there is allowed to spend time there without hearing about the genocide. In Germany, there is a commitment to remind people about the pain and suffering of the Holocaust. In the United States, it is the opposite. Not only are we not committed to telling [the] truth about slavery, lynching, and segregation, we have actually erected an iconography about a false story: how grand and glorious the 19th century was; how honorable the architects and defenders of slavery were; how fantastic it was to live in the first half of the 20th century; and how noble these elected leaders were while preaching segregation forever, or war. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

13 " privilege is stackable, so is oppression. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

14 " Truth and reconciliation are not simultaneous. They are sequential. Tell the truth first, and it’s the truth that motivates you to understand what it will take to recover, repair, endure—to reconcile. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

15 " Those with privilege have the authority to tell, alter, and erase history. "

― Dominique DuBois Gilliard , Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege