Given that most of my theoretical underpinnings are guided by and actively informed by times of deeply painful and personal experiences of struggle, loss, and grief, it has always remained critical for me to correct any narrative that suggests the story of my life has been about a person who was once “bad” and has now been brought into the shining light of “good”.
A restrained, but honest interview response to the notion that I’ve made it out of a less than innocent something, that I often rely on, and have gotten good at saying is, “I’m not exactly sure if I was bad then, and I don’t know if I’m good now.”
I have very little attention and investment in the idea of “innocence” as it most often presents itself in the literal, emotional, and psychological lexicons of this life – of this world. I have, for most of my life now, been in community with people many would refer to as criminals. I have made home in communities, with people many would step over in the street. There have been times in my life where I have been marked as criminal. There have been times I have been marked as a person worthy of being stepped over in the street. The people I am in community with have never been unworthy of grace, or a dignified life. I was as worthy of grace and dignity then, just as I am when receiving an award for writing now.
The binary of innocent and guilty is language most commonly weaponized by the state and passed down to the public. In that passing down, consent becomes commodity, even without people knowing or understanding it, even well-meaning people, who insist this person shouldn’t have been executed, because innocence tells us so. To be so easily seduced by an investment in innocence recreates and reinforces a binary where someone deserves to be executed more or less than someone else.
To be so easily seduced by an investment in innocence or “goodness” recreates and reinforces a binary where some are worthy of brutality, or poverty, or illness.
There is no different world that can be built when the language abused by the state is passively abused by the public.
People who, whether they like it or not, accept it or not, are at the mercy of the state and its discretion.
If there is to be any time spent thinking about innocence, who it is afforded to, and who is marked criminal, it is perhaps useful to reckon with the notion that not even innocence will save us. Not me, not you, not anyone. I have run from the police on my elite college campus having been guilty of nothing besides being outside at an hour that was suspicious enough for me to be chased. I have had guns drawn on me for having the audacity to park an old car on a wealthy street. In a recent project, I have been in conversations with people in prisons, a few of them on death row. That is not a life. The time that hangs over the heads of people waiting for death does not categorize good from bad, innocence from guilt.
There is no graveyard for the guilty and a graveyard for the innocent. There is not a bullet, baton, jail cell, or electric chair, that is able to discern the violence and killing. The tools of the state do what they are asked to by people who have found themselves in positions of power to wield them, with no interest in your alleged innocence. If innocence is not capable of saving anyone, it is useful to ask ourselves quietly and outloud more questions of its usefulness, why people seek it, why people project it onto themselves and others.
Today, I am skeptical and hesitant that any better or more useful world can be built atop this one. It seems at best, improbable. At worst, impossible. The foundations of even the most revolutionary imagined worlds cannot seem to sustain their imaginaires, let alone the process, practice, and labor of building that world. What I do know is this: a reliance on binaries that have been passed down through the state and dare I say lingering and lasting effects of colonization, will not get any of us where we desperately and urgently need to be. I am not skeptical of that. Some things have to be left to ruin.
Marcellus Khaliifah Williams should not have been executed because nobody should be executed. I wish for his peace in his afterlife, with incredible anger and bitterness for what he was not granted in this one.
chase owens
The Bitter Northerner 