“What’s going to happen to us now?” said Andre Zachery after the man who killed his son, Jordan Neely, was acquitted. “I’ve had enough of this. The system is rigged.” Jurors couldn’t decide on Daniel Penny, who evaded a manslaughter charge through a judge dismissal. And while Penny allegedly faces “emotional scars,” Zachery’s son is gone.
Jurors were encouraged to think, “That could’ve been me on the subway.” Identifying with Penny, representative of the racist white desires to kill anything “criminal,” “uncomfortable,” or “unsafe,” means viewing Neely as the social antagonist, deserving of Penny’s cowardly choke.
Fearmongering and scapegoating play on the fears of whiteness. But Neely’s killing being filmed and publicly shared, with Penny becoming a “folk hero,” like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, falls into the tradition of lynching. And lynching is designed to strike fear among us -- that any Black person can be in the noose.
That fear has systemic consequences. Donald Trump, who plans to weaponize the Justice Department, execute the entire federal death row population, and punish “enemies” within U.S. borders, invited Penny to his luxury box at the Army-Navy game.
The criminal legal system weaponizes fear to justify brutalizing our communities. But the late Nikki Giovanni said it best: “I don’t think / I’m allowed / To kill something / Because I am / Frightened.”