“[P]hleeeeeze do not give me that tripe that I do not know the ‘facts’ or that I should read another narrative.... Sankofa and kindred violent criminals are of rather low concern to me.... The fixation on the death penalty and criminals is yet another example of total bankruptcy and idiocy of what passes for the Left nowadays....”
Now that Sokolowski has fully exposed his point of view on the death penalty and the uses to which it is put by the bourgeois state, especially against the poor and people of color, I’ll bow out of this discussion. By singing the Executioner’s Song so stridently and in utter disregard of the innocent men and women who have been legally murdered by the state--or soon shall be, in the cases of Shaka Sankofa and Mumia Abu-Jamal--he has positioned himself on the opposite side of the political barricades and is clearly out of intellectual reach. His attempt to depict himself as some kind of progressive is as transparent as his cynical hypocrisy or his racism on the question of African-American death row prisoners with “funny” names.
Jack A. Smith