America - Through The Eyes Of Jordan Neely's Death
What we can learn
Part 1 of 2
On May 1st, last year, Jordan Neely was acting legitimately scary on a NYC subway. A young man, Daniel Penny, grabbed him from behind, placed him in a choke hold, took him to the floor, and held him there – eliminating Jordan as a threat. There are nuances to the story of course, but it was a fairly simple, straightforward story. Until it wasn’t.
There’s much to deconstruct and much that can be learned here that will expose a lot of who America is: What ails us, what divides us, what triggers us, and what role race plays in all of this. In the middle of all of this is that we can be a better country. But not like this.
The primary nuance to the killing of Jordan Neely of course was race. Neely was Black, Penny is White. So both sides lined up pretty quickly and started hurling names and insults. Penny was called a racist by the Black Lives Matter and liberal crowd and a hero by the right wingers. During the protest one protestor held up a sign that seemed to say it all for the right. “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.”
BLM and Reverend Sharpton should have stayed away. But so should have Ron DeSantis and JD Vance. This wasn’t a sound bite. It was a death.
The forces gathered pretty quickly. Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain said, “Penny did nothing wrong, you idiots.” Probably not exactly the way her Dad would have expressed himself. To the right wingers, Penny’s now a hero from a very wealthy Baltimore family. Rich and White, those who see him as a hero quickly sent him some three and a half million dollars for his defense. The Neely family, poor and Black, has managed to raise about 1/58th of that.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was quick to post, “We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine... America’s got his back,” and published a link to Penny’s fund raising site. And after the acquittal, “I must admit I was skeptical that a jury in New York City would reach a unanimous not-guilty verdict. The jury deserves credit for doing the right thing,”
Matt Gaetz, a former congressman from Florida and provocateur who was President-elect Donald J. Trump’s initial choice for attorney general, called Mr. Penny a “Subway Superman.” And as prosecutors were set to close their case last Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, called Mr. Penny “innocent” and a “hero” in a social media post.
According to JD Vance on social media, “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.” Vance then promptly invited him to sit in his VIP booth with himself and Trump for the Army Navy football game.
There are a couple of things that we can learn here. The right never doubted that by killing Jordan, Penny was with them when it came to race. It was an unquestioned assumption. Imagine the difference if Penny had turned down the invitation. “I appreciate the support and I appreciate the invitation. But I feel compelled to turn it down. I’m not a hero and I killed a man. Taking advantage of that would be disrespectful to both Mr. Neely and to his family. They have my heartfelt condolences.” But he didn’t do that. Glorifying in his new-found fame, he quickly accepted.
And it’s worth bearing in mind in the midst of all this grateful glorification of Penny, that Neely - a Michael Jackson performance impersonator, tall at 5’11 (but still 3 inches shorter than Penny, and as scrawny as Jackson had been) - never actually laid a finger on anyone nor pulled a weapon. He was verbally threatening. He may or may not have verbally threatened the passengers. He may or may not have lunged at them. He deserved to be restrained. But killed? And Penny presented as not just a very good Good Samaritan, but the biggest hero in recent memory…as though he’d thwarted a mass murder.
Much of what I have to say here today will require you to use your imagination because it’s hard to prove what is in someone’s mind. Imagine how all this would have played out had the race roles been reversed. If a Black man had restrained and killed a White guy, how many politicians would have stepped up? How much would have been deposited into his Crowd Source account? Which celebrities or politicians would have invited him into their VIP booth?
My guess is that almost all people agree that Jordan had to be restrained. But did he need to be restrained long after he stopped struggling? Several passengers urged Penny to let up after Jordan had gone limp or, according to one passenger, defecated himself. But Penny held on. Much has been made that Penny was taught this hold - an extremely simple, non-complex hold - by the celebrated United States Marine Corps.
Penny was taught a hold to restrict blood to the brain, causing loss of consciousness and meant to be loosened at that point when the threat has been neutralized, and another meant to crush the trachea and cause death. It’s not clear which hold Penny applied. But it is clear that Jordan went limp. I think that’s the nexus of this incident. Penny says he never fully stopped struggling, so he held him. He held on after passengers pointed out Jordan was motionless. He held on after that one passenger pointed out that he’d defecated and said, “I think you’re supposed to let go after he defecates.” He held on after the train had stopped and the passengers had an opportunity to simply walk away from whatever danger they perceived. He held on until Jordan was dead.
Prosecutor Dafna Yoran showed jurors a Marine Corps manual that showed other ways Penny could have restrained Neely without a chokehold and said he was aware of the danger of his chosen maneuver.
The Marine instructor who taught Daniel Penny says the chokehold was misused. The technique — an apparent “blood choke” — can make a person feel like they’re “trying to breathe through a crushed straw,” said the instructor, who recalled telling Marines: “You don’t want to keep holding on. This can result in actual injury or death. Done right, the maneuver should knock a person out without killing them,” according to Joseph Caballer, the combat instructor who trained Penny in several types of holds. “Held too long, the technique can restrict the flow of blood to a person's brain, ending their life in a matter of minutes. Once the person is rendered unconscious, that’s when you’re supposed to let go.”
Other Marines disapproved of Penny's actions. Gabriel Murphy started a petition calling for his prosecution, arguing Penny did not act in accordance with the training Marines receive. Murphy, a fellow Marine veteran who had deployed to Afghanistan in 2009, argued, "The individual who choked Mr. Neely to death should be prosecuted for murder."
Well, actually, yes… he could have foreseen his untimely death. It’s right there in what he was taught.
Penny says he held on for fear of his life and fear for the lives of the passengers. I believe him that it was all about fear because that’s another thing that he has been taught.
Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sheds light on one of the underlying reasons behind anti-Black bias among White Americans. The research, conducted across five separate studies, reveals that this bias is in part driven by the perception of Black men as a threat, as opposed to simple dislike. I.E…fear.
Years ago cars used to have a gizmo under the hood called a distributor cap. The spark plug wires were connected to it. If the coils or the spark plug wires got wet, the car could just stop running. But if you carried a can of WD-40, it was always very rewarding to hop out, spray the wires, hop back in and drive off. The spray somehow displaced the water. It was even more rewarding to get someone else’s car going.
In 1982 I was living in Salt Lake City. It doesn’t rain often in the desert. If it did, it wouldn’t be a desert. It would be a rainforest. But when it does rain, as often as not it’s torrential. It was during one of those torrential summer rain storms when I was driving through a nice, clean, safe, middle class subdivision in broad daylight. A car was in the middle of the road just beyond a huge, running puddle. I was carrying WD-40, so I prepared myself to be a hero as I pulled up alongside, rolled down my window and asked the young, White woman if she’d like me to get her car started. She said no. I’m like, “Huh?” So I asked again, explaining what I was going to do. She refused again. Then I noticed her terror. She was trembling. So I told her that she’d been watching too much television, drove off, and left her in her stalled car.
Recent events, like the Jordan Neely killing, have underscored the devastating consequences of anti-Black bias, particularly in encounters with law enforcement…or vigilantes. Studies have shown that police apply force against Black individuals at disproportionately higher rates than against other racial groups. In lab studies, when tasked with decisions like whether to “shoot” or “not shoot”, White participants tend to make quicker decisions to shoot armed targets who are Black and slower decisions not to shoot unarmed targets who are also Black. So pervasive is this learned fear that the bias extends even to Black participants themselves. The question is, is this bias solely due to a stronger dislike of Black individuals than other racial groups?
As explained by study author David S. March, an assistant professor of psychology at Florida State University, “As recent events have highlighted, the consequences of anti-Black bias can be deadly. The typical approach to prejudice as balanced (i.e., bad vs. good) evaluations imply that negative evaluations of Black Americans is the problem and redressing the unfavorable attitude is the solution. But I noticed that approach does not easily track field and laboratory data. Many instances of anti-Black bias, like shooter bias, may be more strongly driven by a danger association rather than a mere negative association. That is, instead of ‘dislike’, the underlying problem might be ‘fear’. All five studies consistently revealed that White Americans automatically associate Black men with physical threat.[1]
A similar study at Stanford University in 2004 came to the same conclusion. “The stereotype of Black Americans as violent and criminal has been documented by social psychologists for almost 60 years. Researchers have highlighted the robustness and frequency of this stereotypic association by demonstrating its effects on numerous outcome variables, including people’s memory for who was holding a deadly razor in a subway scene; people’s evaluation of ambiguously aggressive behavior, people’s decision to categorize non-weapons as weapons, the speed at which people decide to shoot someone holding a weapon, and the probability that they will shoot at all. Not only is the association between Blacks and crime strong, it also appears to be automatic.
When police officers were given no information other than a face and when they were explicitly directed to make judgments of criminality, race played a significant role in how those judgments were made. Black faces looked more criminal to police officers and the Blacker, the more criminal.”[2]
Fear. More than likely it was fear and an overly perceived threat from a Black men that led Penny to hold on. Jordan needed to be restrained. But he didn’t need to die.
Part 2 Wednesday
[1] Danger or Dislike: Distinguishing Threat from Negative Valence as Sources of Automatic Anti-Black Bias,” was authored by David S. March, Lowell Gaertner, and Michael A. Olson.
[2] https://web.stanford.edu/~eberhard/downloads/2004-SeeingBlackRaceCrimeandVisualProcessing.pdf 2004