Jordan Neely’s killing and the subsequent acquittal of Daniel Penny can be seen as part of the reactionary existential panic felt by whites whenever the country experiences growing economic instability and hardship.
That jurors on Monday exonerated an ex-Marine for strangling an African American panhandler who was in mental distress while aboard a New York city subway car was not entirely shocking but does signal to many Blacks a sharp escalation of whites’ historic campaign of racial terror.
Daniel Penny, who is white, was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for applying a chokehold to the neck of 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a slightly built homeless man who had done nothing more than shout at passengers aboard an uptown F subway train on May 1, 2023. When jurors deadlocked on the manslaughter charge last Friday, the judge dismissed the charge; the jury deliberated for only a few hours Monday before clearing Penny of the lesser charge as well.
Indeed, jurors’ exonerating lynchers in a criminal court while the news media pathologize their victims is a feature of white settler jurisprudence and a hidebound American tradition, although the egregiousness of Neely’s killing sparked a glimmer of hope that Penny would be held criminally liable similar to the white Minneapolis patrolman, Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murder for applying a fatal chokehold to George Floyd as he lay handcuffed and pleading for his life four years ago.
Following the verdict, however, several social media users posted online that Penny’s fatal assault did not resemble Chauvin’s so much as Kyle Rittenhoue, the teenager who was acquitted of fatally shooting two men—both white–protesting a police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Others wondered aloud if jurors would’ve been more likely to convict Penny had he been videotaped strangling an unruly dog who’d bitten a subway passenger.
And yet another African American, ML Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty , told Black Agenda Report that she was not surprised by the verdict, noting that Penny’s attorneys raised nearly $2 million for his legal defense only days after he had surrendered to police; Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was among more than 25,000 donors who publicly supported the GoFundMe page.
“White people gonna white people,” Smith said in a phone interview. “White supremacy gonna white supremacy. They have never been unclear about their genocide against Black people and its intent to kill or cage us. We are at war with this system of white supremacy.”
Inasmuch as white supremacy is a pillar of settler colonial states such as the U.S., Brazil, Israel and South Africa during its apartheid era, Smith and others say that strident expressions of support for Perry and Rittenhouse represents a deepening of the already bitter resentment that has historically defined whites’ racial attitudes towards Blacks. The trigger was the government’s handling of the 2008 Great Recession, which saddled borrowers with predatory–often fraudulent–debts, widening economic inequality, ultimately causing inflation to spike, and recalibrating living standards for the middle class.
If whites’ default position is moral panic, the financial precarity of the last 16 years has led many of them to double down on a racial contract in which they agree to misinterpret reality in exchange for their privileged positions in society. The result, says Smith and others, is that “white supremacy is finding new ways to lynch us.”
Whites enthusiastic support for Rittenhouse and Penny exemplify their growing thirst for Black suffering as a symbol of white renewal in rituals that are similar to vampires’ bloodletting. So too does their energetic endorsement of President Trump’s racially polarizing rhetoric and policy proposals and the state of Missouri’s execution in September of a 55-year-old African American man, Marcellus Williams, for the 1998 murder of a white woman in her St. Louis home.
A jury of 11 whites and one African American convicted Williams–known as Khallifah–in 2001, based solely on the testimony of two witnesses who expressed an interest in the reward money and negotiating lesser penalties in their own pending criminal cases. Despite a mountain of DNA evidence, hair, and footprints, none of it could be connected to Williams, who denied that he had any involvement in the murder.
The white St. Louis County prosecutor who tried the case, Bob McCulloch, would later refuse to indict the white Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, who fatally shot an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in August of 2014. That, and his defense of police brutality over a 27-year-career would cause voters to replace him with Wesley Bell, an African American reform candidate, in the 2018 election. In January of this year, Bell’s office filed a motion to vacate Williams’ murder conviction, arguing that the lack of evidence, unreliable witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct cast “inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”
Both the U.S. Supreme Court and state officials upheld the verdict however.
“I definitely feel like there are connections to the economy,” said Smith, who worked diligently to free Williams. They (whites) feel like they are losing a grip on the economy–you can’t buy a house the way you could do 50 years ago–and their control of Blacks who just aren’t having it anymore.”
Continuing, she said:
“They are sending the message they’ve always sent which is that it’s always N!gg@ lynching season in America but especially now when they fear that they are losing ground, losing power. . .once they determine that you are not contributing to capitalism, not agreeing to be exploited, then they lynch you. . .by gunning us down the way they did Michael Brown or choking you out like Mr. Neely or they have the lynch mob strap you down to the execution table and pump you full of poison.”
Smith’s analysis is remarkably consistent with historical data. While anti-Black violence in the U.S. is indeed normative, economic crises tend to promote an escalation of white supremacist terror.
According to a compilation begun by the Tuskegee Institute in 1882, the numbers of African Americans lynched nationwide soared in the peak years of the Gilded Age, climbing to 113 in 1891, 161 the following year, 118 the year after that and 134 in 1894 in the throes of a steep financial downturn.
Conversely, as the country began to dig itself out of the rubble of the Great Depression, the number of Blacks lynched plummeted to three in 1943, two in 1944 and one in 1945. By 1952, there wasn’t a single lynching reported anywhere in the U.S., according to Tuskegee’s registry.
That same year, wages for American workers climbed to what was, at the time, their historic high, accounting for roughly 51 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, or GDP. Nine of every 10 working-age men were gainfully employed.
Moreover, the most robust economic expansion in history coincided with the civil rights movement and a decline in the number of lynchings so precipitous that Tuskegee discontinued its registry in 1968 with a final tally of 4,742 victims of extralegal homicides, of whom 3,445 were Black and 1,297 white.
The term “lynching” today is typically used metaphorically yet the threat of violence against Blacks continues unabated in legal, rather than extralegal, form. In its motivation (an assertion of power), result (death), and penalties (none), mob justice today is virtually indistinguishable from its previous iteration, as evinced by the videotaped murders that have become regular segments on evening news broadcasts and podcasts. Authorities reported a sharp spike in hate crimes following Trump’s 2016 election, and a 2013 study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement titled “Operation Ghetto Storm ” found that police or security personnel kill an unarmed African American every 28 hours in the U.S. An analysis of FBI statistics shows that African Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. According to a Washington Post database, police killed more people in 2023 than in any year on record.
The technology used to record the white lynch mob’s handiwork has evolved dramatically—from snapshots photographed on cardboard box cameras to cell phone videos—just as the size, shape, and organization of the bloodthirsty hordes have metastasized from vigilantes to the local gendarme. What remains disturbingly constant, however, is the white settlers’ ritualized desecration of the Black body.
To fully understand this peculiar sacrament of white settler colonialism, it helps to scrutinize the murderous rabble as we might imagine a criminal profiler would investigate a time-traveling serial killer in, say, the pilot episode of CSI: American Lynch Mob.
Poring over the evidence reveals an unmistakable pattern: Our killer’s appetite for bloodshed is whet by some combination of disorienting change in his economic circumstances and African Americans’ loudening demands for equal treatment under the law, which, in tandem, threaten whites’ privileged position in society.
The Red Summer of 1919 proves the point. Five months after a white Georgia mob lynched Mary Turner, cut her unborn baby from her womb and stomped it to death, a lanky, dark-skinned Black man named Aaron Gaskins boarded a commuter train in Alexandria, Virginia, and took a seat in the rear. He had recently purchased a war bond to support the troops in World War I. Why, he wondered, couldn’t he sit anywhere he damn well pleased just like white passengers who paid the same fare as he did?
Finally, like Turner protesting her husband’s lynching for a murder he didn’t commit, Gaskins decided to speak his mind. He rose from his seat, ambled to the front of the train car, and announced to the startled passengers: “I am as good as white people riding in this car,” he declared. “After this war is over we are going to get our rights; we will have a race war if we don’t.”
The train’s engineer reported the incident to authorities who declined to pursue the matter, but the end of the Great War two months later was followed by what the historian John Hope Franklin described as the “worst outbreak of racial violence in the nation’s history.”
Between April and November 1919, there were roughly 25 race riots nationwide, including 97 lynchings and a three-day siege in Elaine, Arkansas, where 200 African American men, women and children were slain after Black sharecroppers threatened to organize a union.
Industrialism was reshaping the U.S. economy. By the end of 1919, about 1 million African Americans had fled the South for job opportunities up North. Between 1910 and 1920, the black population in Chicago grew by 148 percent and in Philadelphia by 500 percent, creating massive anxiety among white people in northern cities that black people were taking jobs, housing, and security from them.
Similarly, the beginning of a post-industrial era is beginning to cause anxiety for whites. An analysis of court records by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, found that 95 percent of the 377 protesters facing criminal charges for the January 6th attack are white, 85 percent are male and m ost live in counties that have experienced significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population.
In the Washington Post, Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and CPOST’s director wrote:
For example, Texas is the home of 36 of the 377 charged or arrested nationwide. The majority of the state’s alleged insurrectionists—20 of 36—live in six quickly diversifying blue counties such as Dallas and Harris (Houston). In fact, all 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.
When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
The biggest problem, however, is African Americans’ acceptance of violence as normal, Smith said. We won’t begin to defend our communities, she said, until we begin to defend the living with the same energy that we mourn the dead