Jordan Neely Did Not Deserve to Die: A Reflection on Black Death

Jordan Neely, a thirty-year-old Black man, was lynched by a white vigilante after being deemed a “public disturbance” on a subway train in New York City. A viral clip is currently circulating of Neely being restrained by an unnamed twenty-four-year-old Marine in a chokehold reminiscent of those once utilized by the Los Angeles Police Department throughout the 1980s before being outlawed in the wake of innumerable deaths. It is crucial to highlight the connections shared between armed extensions of the U.S. nation-state (i.e., police officers or military personnel) acting as instantaneous judges of life and death. These physical proxies of the state, as argued by Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception and Homo Sacer, exist simultaneously within and outside the perimeters of the law. This chaotic flux and coexistence between law and lawlessness can be appropriately depicted by the Modus Darapti syllogism (refer to Figure 1). This unpredictable and paradoxical fluidity between legality and illegality mirrors many of the same plantation politics implemented through the brutality of low-ranking overseers. Black diasporic folk, just as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, have always been well-aware of the dangers affixed to the unlimited power of the unmarked sovereign.

Figure 1: Modus Darapti syllogism.

Murder is an illegal act, but Neely (just like other Black victims of vigilante justice) lacks the biopolitical agency to be considered a human being worthy of sovereignty. Let’s quickly reimagine and restructure the theory of biopower through the lens of basic mathematics: Values between 0-2 are considered deserving of sovereignty and individual selfhood recognized by the state, while any negative variable is considered born-dead, void or invert of life, and subsequently will never share the privilege of being seen as unmarked man. I will assign a value of 2 to straight cishet white men; 1.5 to straight cishet white women; -1 to straight cishet Black men; -1.5 to straight cishet Black women; -2 to queer/trans Black women, etc. These numerical values denote how “alive” one is. I would place Neely between -1 and -1.5 (averaging a mean of -1.25); this combination of Blackness and homelessness is a doubled negation in terms of hindering legitimate selfhood and citizenship protected by the legal superstructures of the nation-state. The unnamed Marine’s proximity to sovereignty—(who I will assign a value of 2)—enables him to engage in brief moments of lawlessness without facing traditional judiciary repercussions. He invokes the state of exception by both adhering to and wholly disregarding the lex terrae (“law of the land”). How can the unnamed Marine be held accountable for killing someone who isn’t even considered a human being? Black flesh is stateless and without merit. Grada Kilomba, author of Plantation Memories, depicts how the white unmarked transfers the shadow-self and subconscious to the flesh and non-being of the racialized Other (aiding in the institutionalized delegitimization of Black flesh):

“In psychoanalytical terms, this allows positive feelings toward oneself to remain intact — whiteness as the ‘good’ self — while the manifestations of the ‘bad’ self are projected onto the outside and seen as external ‘bad’ objects. In the white conceptual world, the Black subject is identified as the ‘bad’ object, embodying those aspects that white society has repressed and made taboo, that is, aggression and sexuality. We therefore come to coincide with the threatening, the dangerous, the violent, the thrilling, the exciting and also the dirty . . . allowing whiteness to look at itself as morally ideal, decent, civilized and majestically generous, in complete control, and free of the anxiety its historicity causes.”

The unnamed Marine, by coding Neely through the tropes and archetypes aforementioned by Kilomba, considered the homeless man a threat that needed to be “controlled,” and ultimately felt justified in murdering/lynching him. His actions have been upheld by the NYPD through the lack of charges filed and the redaction of his identity. The rapid gentrification of New York City also plays a pivotal role in the creation and growth of white spaces. Neely and I share many things in common: We are both Black and hail from the Necropolis (the Dead City). We have both been homeless. We both suffer from mental health issues. He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be executed. Our brother should still be here with us.

I felt urged to write this piece to denounce the resharing and republication of semiotics depicting Black death. Public displays of Black death and torture are not new conditions of the American psyche; they are an integral pastime and multigenerational tradition that date back to the conquest of the New World. María Elena Martínez has written extensively about public lynchings and executions of Black people throughout the New World, more specifically, her article “The Black Blood of New Spain” details how Black folk were brutally murdered in public displays after being falsely accused of conspiracies of usurpation (once again cueing the notion that Black folk must be “controlled” and pose a threat to white spaces):

“On the morning of May 2, 1612, a Wednesday, thirty-five blacks and mulattoes (twenty-eight men and seven women) were escorted by New Spain's authorities through the streets of Mexico City. They were being paraded on horseback, shamed before the residents of the viceregal capital, before all were summarily hanged in front of a large crowd in the central plaza facing the church and palace. The bodies of some of the victims remained suspended in the air through the next day . . . The horrible spectacle did not end with the hangings. After consulting with a group of doctors about the fate of the bodies, Mexico City's royal tribunal, the Audiencia, ordered twenty-nine to be decapitated and the heads left to rot on top of the nine gallows (eight of which had been made for the occasion). The other six were quartered, and the parts were placed on pikes on the city’s main streets and roads. Serving as potent symbols of royal power and of the marginal place occupied by people of African ancestry within the Spanish colonial order.”

The more contemporary recirculation of semiotics depicting lynchings was often safeguarded throughout the Global North by the technologies of film and photography. The documentation of charred, contorted, headless, disemboweled, skinned, and eviscerated Black bodies is extensive. I refuse to link these sources, but the materials are plentiful if you wish to engage with the desensitized and cyclical nature of pornotroping. Some will maintain that the redistribution of semiotics depicting Black death and suffering are necessary to enact systemic change (often referencing the lynching of Emmett Till), but I am reminded of two things: Firstly, the psychological deflection mechanisms clutched by the unmarked (as described by Kilomba) that prevent true atonement for the original sin of chattel slavery. Secondly, a quote from Stokely Carmichael concerning the ideological missteps of nonviolent resistance:

“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart—that’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”