Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely in a New York City subway. That much is undisputed.
Likewise, it is understood that Neely had been acting erratically prior to being placed in a fatal six-minute chokehold by Penny, waving his arms about in a way that Penny, and perhaps others, viewed as threatening.
And according to a jury empaneled in Penny’s trial for negligent homicide, that perception of threat was sufficient to make his actions, while perhaps tragic, ultimately legal. Penny was acquitted on all charges and free to transition into his new role as a right-wing folk hero.
Within days, JD Vance had invited Penny to attend the Army-Navy game with him and Donald Trump because Neely’s killing is but a trifle to the incoming administration and its fans, whose desire to put Black, homeless, and mentally ill people in their place, knows no bounds.
Even if that place is a graveyard.
They are literally gleeful over a racist, classist, ableist murderer.
I referred to Penny this way immediately after the verdict and was pilloried on X by legions of right-wing trolls. Once the pile-on began, the original tweet went viral and attracted the attention of linguist and New York Times contributor John McWhorter, who suggested such a claim was unfair, if not unhinged.
Because, of course, he did.
Minimizing the role of racism in American life is sort of his gig.
But before responding to his denials of Penny’s racism, it’s worth noting that McWhorter, while seeking to rebut my ostensibly unfair characterization of the subway vigilante, ignored two-thirds of the claim I made.
To wit, he punted entirely on the matter of Penny’s classism and ableism, both of which I mentioned as co-equal to his racial bias and which I was suggesting intersected with that bias in critical ways.
To hear John tell it, I had all but called Penny a Nazi who had boarded the subway ready to kill any Black man he encountered.
But, of course, I had said nothing of the sort. My argument is much more nuanced than that, and McWhorter knows it.
I feel confident Penny would not have treated a Black stockbroker on the subway that way, even if the broker had been acting a bit off, perhaps mumbling to himself or cursing the pages of the Wall Street Journal after a bad day in the market.
I’m simply saying that the combination of Neely’s blackness, his economic status (he was homeless at the time), and his mental illness made Penny’s reaction more likely by heightening the perception of the threat he posed in ways that wouldn’t have happened as readily had one or more of those elements been missing.
There is a significant body of social science evidence indicating that we tend to see danger more readily in Black people, poor people, and the mentally ill, even when only one of the factors is present, let alone when all three are, and irrespective of the actual threat posed.
So, although it is impossible to climb inside Penny’s head, it is reasonable to believe that his actions were the result of a heightened sense of danger due to the multiple categories of identity to which Neely belonged.
And yes, Penny may have treated a mentally ill and homeless white person the same way, but that doesn’t acquit him of the charge of racism in this case. Just because he may have acted on the basis of one of the other biases if confronted with an erratic and unhoused white man doesn’t obviate the likelihood that he was operating based on those and anti-Black bias here.
Just because an action isn’t only about racism doesn’t mean it isn’t about racism at all. More than one thing can be true.
And no, it’s not a rebuttal to argue that since violent crime rates are higher for Black folks than others, Penny’s sense of danger was statistically rational. This argument — a favorite of racism denialists everywhere — is both illogical and immoral.
It’s illogical because there is simply no way that Penny took the time to calmly reflect on FBI crime tables before deciding how to respond to Neely. His actions on the subway were not tantamount to a dissertation defense. He wasn’t doing social science. He was killing a man.
The argument is immoral because people are not abstractions on a spreadsheet. You cannot justify a person’s violent mistreatment by pointing to aggregate data referring to the behaviors of different people who merely share a racial category with the one whose mistreatment you’re trying to rationalize.
By the logic of those who raise the issue of “Black crime” to justify anything done to Black people by police or vigilantes, so long as African Americans offend at higher rates, virtually no depravity committed against them could be considered unjust. The implications of this argument are ghastly and render those who offer it suspect as to their own racist tendencies, given their casual indulgence of anti-Black cruelty.
But frankly, even this statistical rationalization would be more intelligent than McWhorter’s explanation for why Penny’s actions shouldn’t be presumed racist.
To McWhorter, it’s unfair to presume racism motivated Penny because few whites hate Black people anymore, and we know this because, of course, Obama was president and because…interracial marriage.
No, really, that’s his argument.
First, no serious person would think racism was solely about hate. Applying such a reductionist view to our nation’s history would make it impossible to call most enslavers racist. After all, few likely “hated” their human property. They merely thought them to be inferior and unworthy of rights.
Because, wait for it…they were racists.
Likewise, most persons who operated segregated businesses probably didn’t hate Black folks. They just thought segregation was proper or were afraid of white customers balking at integration, thereby costing them money. But so what? By going along with and participating in segregation, these business owners were doing racism, with or without animus.
As for Obama, that anyone still argues his election vindicates white folks of racism is laughable. White America, it should be recalled, was far more comfortable with the thought of Sarah Palin being one heartbeat away from the presidency than we were with Obama in the White House.
Plus, the notion that having a Black head of state says anything about racism in that state is no more rational than saying Benazir Bhutto’s election (also twice) demonstrated Pakistan’s triumph over patriarchy.
Just no.
So, too, increasing numbers of interracial marriages say nothing about how widespread racialized fears and stereotypes about Black people are in the white imagination. And this is true, even when, as McWhorter notes, triumphantly:
Hip-hop, the Blackest music in America, is now a staple at some of the whitest weddings, as I have often observed.
I must have missed the part of Dr. King’s dream where he said he longed for the day when drunken white wedding parties would bump “Lose Yourself,” allowing groomsmen, bridesmaids, or both, to pretend they grew up on Eight Mile.
That quoting McWhorter here makes me more embarrassed for him than he obviously was turning these words into the Times in the first place is revelatory.
Seriously though, even in an actual interracial marriage, it is more than possible for the white member of that union to hold racist beliefs about Black people. To suggest otherwise would mean that no heterosexual man can be a sexist if he has a wife or girlfriend — an absurdity that I suspect most women would reject.
In his broadsides against affirmative action over the years, McWhorter has long lamented what he perceives as the lowering of standards for Black students seeking admission to elite colleges and universities. Although I disagree with the suggestion that those students are less qualified than others or that standards have been lowered, it does strike me that while the Ivy League has always held Black folks to high standards, the New York Times clearly is not.
And John McWhorter’s embarrassingly weak defense of Daniel Penny is proof of it.
—
Previously Published on Medium
iStock image
