In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.
Interpretation
The state holds the power over life and death in effective legal systems, while weak legal structures can empower mob justice.
In this quote, Teju Cole emphasizes the critical role of a functioning legal system in society. He argues that in countries where the courts are strong and law enforcement is effective, the state retains the authority to administer justice, including capital punishment. However, in societies plagued by weak legal systems and systemic injustices, the absence of reliable law enforcement can lead to a breakdown of order, where mobs may resort to violence and punishment outside the bounds of the law.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of legal reform in developing countries.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Mass incarceration and its never-ending human toll will be with us until we come to see that no crime justifies permanent civic death.
I think it's useful to recall that a lot of these statutes like 'disrupting the classroom' or 'disturbing the peace' have long been historically used to oppress and criminalize black people.
No matter what his crimes were, Alton Sterling did not deserve to be executed for them. Look, guys, the punishment for resisting arrest shouldn't be death. The punishment for selling bootleg CDs shouldn't be death. The punishment for having a gun in an open-carry state shouldn't be death. The punishment for being a black man shouldn't be death.
If an African-American or a recent immigrant - or anyone else, for that matter - can't feel secure walking into a police station or up to a police officer to report a crime, because of a fear that they're not going to be treated well, then everything else that we promise is on a shaky foundation.
Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.
We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.
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