Against the Internet
On the oxymoronic "online left".
On September 24th, 2024, Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams was executed by the state of Missouri via lethal injection. Convicted for the murder of a white woman in 2001, he has maintained his innocence throughout his life, as have many lawyers and activists who point out the lack of forensic evidence among other issues with the case. In the days leading up to his execution, his story went viral on the portions of social media we might affectionately dub “the online left”. Despite hundreds of people being mobilized to visit the Missouri governor’s office to deliver 1.25 million signatures on a petition requesting his freedom, the state carried on with his murder, forcing us all to reckon with not only the continued racism of this country, but the reality that we may have run up against the limits of what our current forms of activism are capable of. The State does not listen to The People, point blank.
We are all implicated in the murder of Khalifeh Williams. Obviously, the state apparatus that grants itself the ability to kill innocent people is to blame for this horror. However, another question we need to ask is, why did the wider American Left only learn about this execution with mere days left to act on it? It seems pretty clear that a well-organized movement for justice, one that could produce swarms of people showing up to the governor’s office and more than a million signatures, should have been able to prevent this murder. Could we have done so if we only knew about this situation months ago instead of a week ago?
Keiajah “KJ” Brooks, famous for her viral dragging of a Kansas police board, was one of the boots-on-the-ground, “IRL” activists working on Williams’ case. In a recent TikTok video, she claimed that despite reaching out to some of the largest social justice creators about his upcoming execution more than two months ago, many of them left her on read. Translation: many of the biggest names that we look to for guidance on leftist issues knew about Williams’ upcoming execution and said nothing until days before it happened (once it became popular to do so).
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
We can’t really say why these creators didn’t speak when they could have. We also can’t open a portal to another timeline where the online left mobilized months or years ago to check if Khalifah Williams is still alive over there. Nonetheless, it haunts me to consider the possibility that we, leftist creators, could have saved a man’s life if we acted then instead of mere days before his murder, once it was arguably too late to reverse course. It leads me to wonder: If leftist content creators are only making reactive content about what’s currently trending, rather than proactive content about things they can actually mobilize their audiences to do something about, then what does that say about our capabilities as a movement for justice?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to That Anna Marie Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.