“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels’ Abdul-Qudduus, aka Marcellus Williams, has been murdered. After over twenty-three years spent living in a cage, under the constant threat of execution — after the thirty years before his formal sentence living in the open-air prison we call the United States of America — the last of Khaliifah’s life was finally stolen. Apparently, death row inmates get to “choose” how the state will execute them, whether it’s death by lethal injection, or death by gassing. Capitalist freedom as its most honest binary: Coca-Cola or Pepsi; exploitation or starvation; knee or noose; the needle or the gas chamber.
Khaliifah elected the needle. Might someone have asked him, in his death throes: “Mr. Williams, is this harm reduction?” Tell me, is this a lesser evil?
For those who knew in the years before Khaliifah’s murder—
For those who knew in the weeks before Khaliifah’s murder—
For those who knew in the minutes before Khaliifah’s murder, many have decried the injustice of his impending execution and insisted on his innocence. As his body cools, this insistence continues like the cries of the bereaved. As the days of his passing shift to months, this clamor will repeat like a seance. (In decades, if we let it, the wailing of ghosts. All of us haunted.) Nothing makes more sense than this: Khaliifah’s murder represents not just the apathetic killing of a human being, but necessarily as well the defamation of his memory. Since the U.S. government refused to spend the time and money to stay Khaliifah’s execution, release him from prison, and investigate the process that pushed things so far, the state elected to do the more practical thing. They must not only kill a man, they must make it the “moral” thing to do. This is the logic of the lynch mob.
All of us who oppose this repugnancy feel compelled to refute every accusation to defend a good man’s legacy. This is understandable. Necessary, even. But it must be stated and restated just as much, if not more, that there is no sort of person the U.S. government has the right to kill. There is no person this horrific regime has the right to imprison. No person it has the right to beat or abduct or shackle or tailgate or ticket. Its laws are fundamentally unjust, not merely by their content, but the fact that the dictatorship of white supremacy, of the capitalist, is antithetical to the safety of the vast majority of life on this earth. If we argue that there is an unjust imprisonment by the court’s metric of “innocence” or “guilt,” we are ceding ground to our enemy, an empire that tirelessly builds itself on countless Khaliifah’s — a hundred million dead, billions of butchered half-lives.
We would not find it worth celebrating if every red-handed viper responsible for Khaliifah’s murder was dragged into the light, handcuffed, charged, and sentenced by the bourgeois state. We would not consider it justice or a victory if they were executed, held for life, or fully reformed. Any action the bourgeois state takes is for its own preservation and the continued safety of the ruling classes. The bourgeois state cannot bring us justice. We saw that with the charging of Derek Chauvin, when the dictatorship of white capital used one hand to toss its servant into a cell to sooth public rage, while, with the other, flooded the same murderous police with ever more funding and arms. If Khaliifah’s execution had been stayed again, and he’d been allowed to rot longer in jail, that would be nothing worth celebrating. Even his full freedom from the prison industrial complex would not be true freedom, for he would have walked from one prison to another, a different kind of captivity. True justice will only be taken by us. This is the foundation for a Communist abolition. Not opposition to imprisonment as a concept wholly, but that we must always oppose the use of weapons in our enemies’ hands. A recognition that within this country, for the oppressed, everywhere is a prison — that to die under capitalism is to have been killed by it.
the silhouettes of their bond visible still at the last glow of the sun
Khaliifah, At Last…Another’s heartbeat
they experience each other and the life of the night as it begins to stir
standing there in silence holding hands
no rush to go back inside
there is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being…
–amidst sounds of buzzing
chirps
crickets
the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind
fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon
how strange it is to become aware of another’s heartbeat but forget one’s own –
finally love.
