ISS - Why does the South execute more people?

Just so you understand.

(via tressiemcphd)

Yes. This is something that’s important to understand about many white people: they actually cheer killing people of color. This cultural fact has not changed despite changes in public protocol. They used to have family picnics under swinging corpses, which they can no longer do but they still feel that urge, which is why, in the last two Republican debates, Tea Partiers actually cheered at the mention of death. When Rick Perry was talking about delivering “ultimate justice” to criminals in Texas and Ron Paul was talking about the “meaning of freedom” being that society allows an uninsured man to die, those white people had a picture of the person dying in their heads. And that person was not white.

On another note, it is my belief that the strongest polemical argument against the death penalty is the argument of human fallibility. Because the death penalty cannot be undone, and because human systems are necessarily flawed and fallible, and because it is obviously wrong to kill innocent people, the death penalty must be abolished. Then again, if state execution has become a culturally sublimated form of lynching, then white people will cheer it on as long as they can, until their grasp on power weakens to that point — a point which we are approaching and some of us are attempting to accelerate.

(via zuky)