On the morning of May 24, 2023, DeAndre Gordon set his cell on fire. His own leg was covered in burns. Imprisoned at a supermax facility, he improvised an electrical fire from what he could get in his cell. A year later, on August 23, 2024, Demetrius Wallace did the same. Weeks after that, on September 15, Ekong Eskiet followed suit. Likely, Eskiet had heard about Wallace through the grapevine, and followed his method. All three men share a building, after all, so whispers must have spread; if not the stench, then the thinning air, the screams of agony. Why would they commit such an extreme act, mutilating their own bodies? Ask the coyote why it tears through its leg to flee a steel trap.
Many are describing these acts as a “protest” of the horrific conditions at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison. That is a mistake. It was a protest when Demetrius Wallace, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, and 12 other imprisoned people organized a food strike that lasted nearly two weeks for Wallace and 71 days for Rashid. In retaliation, the prison punished Wallace by revoking his right to see friends and had guards threaten, stalk, and harass said friends. Wallace himself was already suffering additional punishment for attempting to use the “proper” channels to defend himself — for daring to bring a lawsuit against guards who had ruthlessly beaten, sprayed, and stomped on him while he was restrained.
Such are the conditions at the Red Onion prison. Suffering intolerable abuse, beaten away from legal means, and exiled for peaceful protest, men are now setting themselves on fire. These are no longer acts of protest, or even individual defiance. These are calculated acts of desperation. Conditions in the prison are so bad its victims would rather self-immolate and roll the dice that they could be transferred elsewhere than continue their horrific routine. And what happens to those men that are transferred? They are sent right back. Wallace, the self-immolater of late summer, said that when he returned to Red Onion after two weeks in a hospital, his harassment continued, he was thrown in solitary, and his email and phone privileges were still revoked — an ongoing retaliation for his earlier lawsuit. These are just the men we know of. Wallace says five others were at the hospital with him in Richmond, Virginia, where he was being treated for his burns. If this is just the overlap of when he arrived, it’s safe to assume there are many more cases we aren’t allowed to know about.
There is a widespread myth, one even those sympathetic to the legacy of the Black Panther Party (BPP) fall prey to: that somehow life in prisons has gotten better since the mass struggles to end racial apartheid in the United States. The myth that things have improved for imprisoned people within the vast penal colonies of the United States, in spite of everything we know about the continued abuses of the police state on our streets and in our homes, that their ruthless behavior will have gotten even an iota better behind closed doors and with complete impunity.
Rashid Johnson describes an atmosphere of extreme paranoia and oppression, where every day prison guards try to pressure and barter Johnson’s fellow abductees into assassinating him. We might as well be describing the 1960’s conditions of the BPP theorist George Jackson, who wrote of having to constantly be prepared to divert a stabbing and wrestle his way out of assassination. Conditions at Red Onion, and, let’s face it, supermax prisons in general, mirror what Huey Newton described with his greatly radicalizing exposure to the U.S. prison colony — lying in a tiny cell with a hole in the middle, slowly filled with his own excrement. Dogs, classically used by fascist police during the Civil Rights era to assault and intimidate protestors, are used in Red Onion. Rashid Johnson describes systematic use of attack dogs to terrorize and brutalize prison populations.
The imagery of the brutality of the war on U.S. apartheid is alive still, cordoned off behind cement and barbed wire, beyond photography and video. It would be wrong to say, “all that is old is new again,” since for the oppressed and imprisoned, such horrors never ceased. Everyday, hundreds of atrocities that might have sparked the fires of another George Floyd uprising occur, beyond where we can see or hear them, and are then denied by fascists like the head of Virginia’s Department of Corrections, who say that those lighting themselves aflame are ‘manipulative’ and ‘misbehaving’. Here stands naked the depravity of colonial capitalism. To accurately assess the current reality of our so-called republic, we need only turn toward the prisons, and not flinch at what we see, hear, or smell. First you see smoke, then fire. Hundreds of thousands of people are choking on the smoke.
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