The death penalty represents the very pinnacle of class struggle in this country called America. It always has, and it always will, until the people of this country put an end to this system in which only the poor are legally murdered!
Classism and the struggles that come forth from certain classes of people, especially the middle and lower classes, the working poor people, is a very real and important issue in this capitalistic country.
Unlike racism, sexism, homophobia and all other related manmade prejudices that effect specific groups, classism effects the whole population of poor people in this country, regardless of race, sexual orientation, or gender. While racism deals with race or people of color, and sexism is directed at women and homophobia at gays and lesbians, classism is directed at each and every one of these groups of people if they are poor.
These groups are not a whole population of people but are representatives of people within the population. Each of these groups of people, however separate they are from each other, make up the whole population when they all come together. Classism cuts through all the personal things that makes each of us poor people different from each other. It unites us in ways that nothing else can!
I guess this is why all groups of poor people are represented on death row, especially poor white people! America has a rich tradition of sacrificing poor white people in order to show that �no racism is taking place.� For example, the former governor of Oklahoma Frank Keating said the following about his state�s use of the death penalty: �The vast majority of people executed in this state are white people, especially white men.� What he didn�t say though, which is equally important and would put what he did say into an entirely different context is this: �All the people executed in this state, including the white people, are poor people!� Why didn�t he speak this truth? Because if he had, he would be exposing the truth about this country�s death penalty system, and the role that classism has within it.
This place called the prison industrial complex and death row have to be the only places within this country that the rich men, women, and their families need affirmative action to get into! This place is void of them and their population. To say that the rich don�t get the death penalty is a real truth, but one that falls on deaf ears in the legal world. To deny or act as though the rich don�t commit murder or have others commit murder for them is a crime in and of itself! Just look at Bush�first as governor of Texas he committed murder, then when he went to the white house he and his handpicked crew got others to do their murders for them.
We poor people are tired, truly tired of paying the price, sometimes with our very lives, for being born into a population of people who by no fault of their own happen to be poor! No one asked to be born and especially not to be born poor. Just as rich people don�t ask to be born, or born rich. We are who we are no matter how we happen to be born or what status we happen to be born into. It appears though that only rich people seem to benefit from their unasked for birth, and we poor people suffer because of ours!
I for one am tired of suffering, and I know that all poor people do suffer needlessly in some aspect of their lives just because they are poor. We as a poor population of people need to come together to end the death penalty in this country. It is in our best interest to do so; after all it is only we who are executed/legally murdered by the powers that be. This is a historical fact that cannot be denied by anyone!
In order for this anti-death penalty movement to grow and to strengthen itself, we need all poor people no matter what their race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or what have you to come together as a population of poor people. We need to add the fight to end the death penalty to our separate agendas, because as I stated before and will state again, �All of us poor people are represented on death row!�
Yes, the pinnacle of class struggle in America is the death penalty! We poor people don�t want the rich to be executed either, it�s just that we are tired of having it only done to us. The only way to see to it that it is not done to us anymore is to put and end to it.
I, Kevin Cooper, am determined to put an end to this sick system of manmade murder by the government somehow, some way, someday. It would be so much easier though if I had your help in this fight. Please get involved if you�re not already because the time has come to put an end to capital punishment in America!
In Struggle From
Death Row at San Quentin
Kevin Cooper