I need to break my Substack silence for this. Jordan Neely’s murder, his lynching, cannot be overlooked, unsaid.
Bernice King aptly posted on Instagram, “The system is not broken. It’s fixed.”
This is exactly how the American system is supposed to work, if it was fundamentally built upon antiblackness. If the system is antiblack, then this is how it’s all supposed to be — built on the backs of the enslaved and the displaced.
Remember the lynchings of recent years — George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Jordan Neely…
There are more names. More shoved into the gutter.
This is antiblackness. It cannot be separated from America, the idea of it, the reality of it, the actual place of it. America and antiblackness are synonymous. Jordan Neely’s lynching is representative of that.
Last night, I saw I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 James Baldwin documentary, without knowledge of Neely’s murder. Waking up this morning to the news, I remembered Baldwin’s prophetic words at the end of the film:
But the Negro in this country... the future of the Negro in this country... is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and not representatives. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger they have maligned so long.
What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a 'n*****' in the first place. Because I am not a n*****, I am a man! But if you think I'm a n*****, it means you need him. And the question the white population of this country has got to ask itself… If I am not the n***** here, and you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that…
Black was invented in the same way that white was invented — to create a system of racial power. Race is not biologically inherent to the created order, but socially constructed to invent a world upon which some people could gain freedom at the unfreedom of certain others. In other words, race is made up, a myth, a lie. A way of life that destroys life in the process.
This is what Baldwin is interrogating. When someone thinks of him as Black, it shows how there is a reason why he is signified as “Black.” Being Black represents a social need. To call someone “Black” means that you “need him.” It means that “white people invented him” for some nefarious reason.
And we need to “find out why,” Baldwin urges. Because “the future of the country depends on that.”
“The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.”
Jordan Neely was houseless in New York City, suffering a painful history of mental illness and family troubles. He lost his mother when he was 14 years old. She was strangled to death too.
Over the years, Neely grew depressed, suffering from schizophrenia and PTSD, living on the streets. Eventually, he started dancing his way through the city. It was how he coped. He donned a Michael Jackson outfit, and moonwalked through his troubles. Neely was eventually recognized by the public as an impersonator of Michael Jackson. And there, on the streets where he lived, he danced. He danced and danced, and danced, and danced.1
And he was lynched. He was lynched by a white man on the F Train. The white man’s lawyers said that the white man felt threatened, so he murdered Neely. But he also “never intended to harm” him.2
People watched as Neely was strangled to death by the white man. We call them bystanders, because they just stood by. Idly.
Neely was lynched at thirty years old.
At the time of writing this piece, the white man has not been arrested. He remains free to walk the streets of America and take the same F Train, where Neely’s blood could be heard crying from the ground.
“The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.”
Michael Wilson and Andy Newman, “How Two Men’s Disparate Paths Crossed in a Killing on the F Train,” The New York Times.
Katherine Donlevy, “Daniel Penny ‘never intended to harm’ NYC subway chokehold victim Jordan Neely: lawyers,” The New York Post.