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Join us, feminist coaches Taina Brown and Becky Mollenkamp, for casual (and often deep) conversations about business, current events, politics, pop culture, and more. We’re not perfect activists or allies! These are our real-time, messy thoughts as we make sense of the world around us. If you also want to create a more just and equitable world, please join us on the journey to Messy Liberation.
Becky Mollenkamp: Good morning.
Taina Brown: Good morning. I think I'm actually in the same time zone as you today. Yeah.
Becky Mollenkamp: You are, you are. You're in the Central Time Zone, which is where I am. So you're traveling?
Taina Brown: I am traveling. I’m in Houston. I’m meeting with one of my clients in person and then I’m also doing some leadership development, a workshop for her core team of directors. So that’ll be fun. It’ll be different from the normal log on to Zoom kind of experience, I think.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, that’s exciting. Travel is always nice and exhausting, so I hope it’s mostly good. Speaking of exhausting, we were going to talk about a very heavy, tiring kind of issue, something that for me, and maybe for you as well, it sounds like, helped us have an unsettled night of sleep. As we’re recording this, which by the time it comes out on Monday will be almost a week old but not quite, yesterday in the state where I am, which is Missouri, the state executed, murdered, Marcellus Williams via the death penalty, lethal injection, for a crime he very, very likely did not commit. Prosecutors who prosecuted him wanted him to not be put to death. His defense did not want him to be put to death. The family of the victim of the crime he likely did not commit did not want him put to death. No one wanted him put to death, except for the state. I don’t know, maybe it’s because if we say he was wrongfully convicted, we have to pay him a lot of money. That’s a thing. You know, a conspiracy theorist or maybe just a realist might say that could be part of it. Also, we really hate getting things wrong. And then also, I live in a very red state where we have long known that the right of America is bloodthirsty. They love a good lynching. To be clear, Marcellus Williams was a Black man, a Muslim Black man at that. I’ve seen many people calling this a lynching, and I think that’s valid. Anyway, I was very sad yesterday. I took a moment of silence at 6 p.m. when we knew it was happening. All day people were doing everything—well, not just all day, it’s been weeks of people trying to stop things. Of course, that was probably never going to happen, but yeah, it’s heavy and sad.
Taina Brown: Yeah. I don’t know much about the case just because the past few weeks have been chaotic for me personally, but I’ve seen it pop up on my social media feeds. And just want to say real quick, if you’re listening and you don’t know anything about this case or you haven’t seen it pop up on your social media feeds, you need to train your algorithm a little better. Because if this is news to you—one, welcome, I’m glad you’re here and listening to us discuss this—but also, this is the kind of information that should be coming across your desk regularly if you’re on a journey of messy liberation. It’s heavy. We don’t like to think about death, or how finite our lives are, or what happens after we’re gone. We like to think of ourselves as invincible. So this may not be a comfortable topic, but death is a part of life. You can’t have life without death. It’s important to acknowledge that you can’t avoid talking about death, whether it’s personal or like this one that means so much to so many communities. But also, this is part of the messiness. Sometimes it’s fun when we’re talking about problematic faves, but sometimes it’s emotionally heavy when we’re talking about state-sanctioned violence against Black and brown bodies. The American narrative loves a villain who’s Muslim, right? The Muslim community has been vilified for so long, going back to the Crusades, where the Roman Catholic Church fought to convert people like the Moors who practiced Islam. So yeah, I was traveling yesterday at 6 p.m., and I didn’t even realize that the time had passed for his state-sanctioned murder. I think that’s really the only way to call it when people involved in the legal process—not just activists—were advocating for him to not be executed.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, and this isn’t just about Marcellus Williams. Four days before that, Khalil Owens was executed in South Carolina under similar circumstances where someone admitted to lying on the stand days before he was to be executed. In both cases, no one was asking to free the person, just to pause and reflect before taking a human life. The pushback against that is baffling.
Taina Brown: It is baffling, but also not surprising because this is deeply embedded in the roots of the American system. The way we value and devalue lives is clear. Most of the people executed this year are non-white, mostly Black.
Becky Mollenkamp: I want to share a resource. One is the Innocence Project, which works to change the death penalty in America by looking at wrongful convictions, especially around how we’re executing innocent people. Another is deathpenaltyinfo.org, where you can see who’s been executed, by what state, race, and method. There are disproportionately more Black folks being executed than their population size would indicate. Since 1973, 200 former death row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges. That’s a huge number of people who would’ve been put to death but were found innocent.
Taina Brown: That should be a clear indication to people who operate within the system to rethink things. If you had a discrepancy that big in research, your entire study would be called into question. Yet here we are with the prison industrial system and systemic racism, and no one takes it seriously.
Becky Mollenkamp: First of all, so many incarcerated people are non-white, and if you compare that to their proportion of the population, it’s disproportionately high. You can’t just look at one stat and say, “That’s the story.” Data needs context, which is how you build the full narrative.
Taina Brown: And when we’re talking about systemic racism, that’s what we mean. There’s a disproportionate number of non-white people incarcerated in this country, and many of them are on death row. No offense should warrant death row. I’m heavily against the death penalty. At no point should a legal system or a state be deciding whether someone’s life is valuable enough to keep or to disregard. That ties directly to settler colonialism, war, and imperialism. In war, you have to contend with other people as less than human to justify killing them.
Becky Mollenkamp: It’s another form of eugenics.
Taina Brown: Speaking of eugenics, that was big in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. People often associate eugenics with Nazism, but most don’t know that the Nazis founded their practices on U.S. eugenics principles.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hitler sent his people to the U.S. to learn from our scientists about how to implement what he wanted. He saw what we did with slavery and said, "Hmm, you guys were really masterful at this. Let’s learn from you." But as a society, we don’t want to confront that. It feels better to look at another culture or group of people and "other" them—to say, “Not me, not us.”
Taina Brown: And white feminists often do that, saying, “I’m not one of the bad ones. I’m one of the good ones.” That’s part of the white saviorism baked into our collective American history.
Becky Mollenkamp:. And I want to share a study, which I’ll put in the show notes. It talks about how capital punishment is rooted in slavery. The state-level legacy of slavery directly connects to executions today. The study also shows how racialized capital punishment is. If you’re convicted of killing a white person, you’re far more likely to receive the death penalty than if you kill a Black person. Same goes for if you’re Black versus white. Marcellus Williams, for instance, was a Black man convicted of killing a white woman. It’s the worst thing you can do in this country—look at Emmett Till. The stats bear that out.
Taina Brown: The worst crime in America is being Black and harming a white person, even if you didn’t actually do it. That makes sense when we look at a lot of these statistics.
Becky Mollenkamp: And if you look at this year’s executions, all but one took place in Southern states—mostly in Texas and Missouri, where you and I are right now. Those states, along with Florida and Oklahoma, have the highest execution rates. Alabama and Georgia also execute frequently. This shows the legacy of slavery clearly.
Taina Brown: People who try to separate the death penalty from slavery are the same ones who divorce the U.S. from its complicity in atrocities like the Holocaust. They say, “We only stepped in to save the day,” and refuse to acknowledge how the U.S. modeled what happened there.
Becky Mollenkamp: And to say the death penalty is disconnected from slavery because “it’s been so long”—well, it hasn’t been that long. The data is clear.
Taina Brown: And we need to stop gaslighting ourselves. Our legal systems and politicians already gaslight us enough. Don’t let them manipulate you into thinking these issues aren’t connected. The death penalty is a direct legacy of slavery, eugenics, the genocide of Indigenous people, and settler imperialism. Not just here, but in the way we fund wars and glamorize violence globally. This concept of American exceptionalism tells us we’re the exception to everything because of our manifest destiny, but that’s just not the case. I’m not unpatriotic—I love this country. I love the people. I just want this place to be the kind of place it claims to be. But when you tell me it’s already that place, you’re gaslighting me. That’s why movements like Civil Rights, Black Lives Matter, and abolishing the death penalty exist—they’re a response to the gap between what America says it is and what it actually does. There’s a huge disconnect between the values this country claims and how things are actually implemented. For people like us who focus on values alignment, that’s why we’re so frustrated with processes like this.
Becky Mollenkamp: And it’s why I’m so frustrated during this election season. I hear people say, “Vote like your life depends on it because it does!” And that’s mostly coming from white people. They’ll say to me, “How dare you critique Harris when Trump could get elected?” But for Black people, every election has been life and death, and none of it has made a difference. Democrats get elected and nothing changes.
Taina Brown: Yeah, you’re telling on yourself.
Becky Mollenkamp: This morning, Black folks woke up to a world no different than yesterday. They’re no less afraid that their Black brother, husband, or uncle could be killed by the police, or if lucky enough to survive that, wrongfully convicted and put to death for something they didn’t do. That’s reality. And yes, maybe now white people care because they have a queer loved one or someone whose reproductive health is threatened. But to say this election is somehow different or more existential now tells Black people that none of this mattered until it affected you personally.
Taina Brown: You didn’t care when Bush or Reagan were elected. You care now because it affects you personally. And that’s okay, you should care. But don’t turn around and shame others for criticizing Democrats or for demanding more when Black and Indigenous people have been fighting these battles for generations.
Becky Mollenkamp: Or pretend Biden or Harris represents major change. They don’t. And just so people know, since 1973, 3,200 people were convicted of crimes in the U.S. and later exonerated because they were innocent. Of those, 53% were Black—four times their population rate. That has to tell you something about how the system operates. Also, this year, Democrats have been nearly silent about capital punishment. Joe Biden promised to stop federal executions and incentivize states to abolish the death penalty, but that hasn’t happened.
Taina Brown: The Democrats use the same promises every election cycle, knowing they’ll get your vote by dangling the carrot of progress. They say, “Vote for us, we’ll fix this,” but then they don’t do anything.
Becky Mollenkamp: They just bully you back into voting blue with scare tactics like, “Shut up and vote blue or democracy ends.” It’s like you said, “We’ll talk about it after the election,” but the meaningful change never comes. In some ways, I think it’s worse than the Republicans, because at least Republicans are being honest about their intentions. Democrats say one thing to your face and do the opposite.
Taina Brown: Republicans have told us who they are. Democrats keep stringing us along.
Becky Mollenkamp: And they’re both in the pockets of corporate interests. The prison industrial complex is a major area of profit, just like the war machine. Democrats fund wars for private interests, and they fund prisons for the same reason. The prison system is privatized, and it’s disgusting and inhumane. Look at what’s happening inside jails, especially youth detention centers and women’s prisons. The conditions are horrifying, and so much of it is because we’ve privatized the system and turned it into a for-profit operation.
Taina Brown: These prisons cut corners everywhere, from meals to healthcare. They don’t hire staff because they make the prisoners do all the labor. The system is designed to dehumanize people, especially Black and brown bodies.
Becky Mollenkamp: And it’s basically slavery. Prisoners are paid next to nothing for their labor. The conditions are beyond inhumane, and for so many people, prison becomes the best option because the system is designed to trap them in a cycle they can’t escape.
Taina Brown: It’s absolutely modern-day slavery. And there are resources out there that lay this out clearly. “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander and the documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay on Netflix both show the direct connection between slavery and the prisons we have today.
Becky Mollenkamp: And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. If you have any empathy, your world will be rocked. It’s time to shake off the narrative we’ve been given and look at the reality. We need to start holding our political candidates accountable and make sure this is as important an issue as reproductive rights or foreign policy.
Taina Brown: Pro-life should mean pro-every-life. You don’t get to pick and choose.
Becky Mollenkamp: Exactly. Thanks for having this conversation. It was heavy, but important. We’ll share resources in the show notes, and I’m excited to chat with you again soon.