![]() The bystanders who allowed Neely to die by Penny’s hands right in front of them without advocating for his life chose comfort over kindness and their own biases towards homelessness and Black people over mercy. Neely from his chokehold? The people in that subway car prioritized their own discomfort and anxiety over Mr. “Did anyone ask the former Marine to release Mr. Over and over, we saw the police and media outlets, including The NYTimes, contort themselves to say everything but what happened, to soften the blow of the cold-blooded killing. When someone holds us in a chokehold for several minutes, something far worse has occurred,” Roxane Gay writes for The New York Times. As we’re watching Neely’s legacy form in real time - as a figurehead of the fight for people experiencing homelessness or as a dangerous lunatic who deserved to die - I can’t help but see the obvious parallels between him and Floyd, and the glaring ways in which the media, the police, the public, and their killers refused to treat them with a shred of human decency. ![]() They have become white knights, saviors of civility, while Both Floyd and Neely were stripped of their humanity to become hashtags. These people have been able to find empathy for men capable of so callously killing another, but not for their victims. Penny has expressed no remorse for his actions and, like Chauvin before him, has received an outpouring of support and defense from strangers. And yet, a white former marine named Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold for 15 minutes (according to one onlooker), effectively killing him. According to accounts, Neely was yelling and in distress. His actual calls were for food and water - basic human necessities - but at their core, his cries were simply a plea for help. Neely was an unhoused Black man on a New York City subway pleading for someone to see him. Jordan Neely is just the latest – and most public – example. On the third anniversary of his murder, I imagine that there will be a few tributes, some nods to the fact that his brutal murder catapulted the country into a long overdue conversation about the white supremacy embedded into its fabric, but generally, (white) people seem to want to go back to a time when Black life lost was an inconvenience they could ignore, not a systemic plight rightly inciting riots and calls for change. ![]() Like mandatory masks and the cast of Tiger King, the public remembrance of Floyd is slowly being relegated to A Thing We Cared About In 2020. Floyd is now fading into the background of our post-2020 timelines. In the three years since George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, his death has been used as a prop for political gain - on the right to justify their tirade against “wokeness” and fairness and the fact that anti-Black racism exists, and on the left to sign into order police-reform legislation that wouldn’t have saved Floyd’s life. ![]()
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