It was a Sunday night and my partner felt homesick, so they showed me videos of some of the less evil parts of Washington DC that they missed: Shaw, Adams Morgan, and spots like Rocket Bar, located in DC’s Chinatown. I’ll admit, as a DC disliker (never has a city skated on having good museums, copious weed, and the best restaurant named Chinatown Express in the country like Washington DC has) I was watching with mild attention, but on the YouTube search results, I noticed a video by a channel called HoodTime that showed “the Worst Hoods in DC”.
“Chinatown? Really?” The only thing I ever was scared of happening to me was a breakup and the worst thing I saw when I was was a rat the size of a groundhog. The Capital One Arena is close by, and being a Wizards fan is certainly dangerous to your self esteem, but beyond that: how bad can it be?
We talked about Chinatown-- apparently you can get drugs there!--and then clicked on the video. It was dashcam footage driving through a neighborhood of DC. My partner identified it as Northwest. I wouldn’t know: most of my trips to DC have been around the Capitol.
The video was boring: dashcam footage. Every once in a while, you’d see a throng of black locals. Sometimes around cars, sometimes in the parking lot of package stores. The apartments were efficiency apartments. None of it exactly screamed danger..
We switched to another video, this time of a neighborhood they knew had a dicier reputation: Anacostia. More decrepit than Northwest, with more boarded up buildings. Again, the same pattern, though we did see somebody selling Newports out of a carton, which is illegal if not dangerous. It was until we got to the third video we saw anything that communicated “danger”: we stopped the video when we saw somebody, on the sidewalk, laid out in the heat: not the bedlam that conservatives claim you see in the inner city, but still a reminder neither of us wanted to have, and we switched the video off after. As far as Chicago’s hot boys selling their wares go, that consists of standing around cars, waiting to serve.
These videos don’t have commentary: there is just the car driving in neighborhoods the driver doesn’t live in, an observer of the quotidian inner city life. But the framing is that there is danger around every turn, that every pack is on its haunches, waiting for an antelope to pass so they can give chase.
Jordan Neely was murdered on a subway by three men, the most prominent of which, Daniel Penny, a Marine who’s turned the Bronson bowl cut into the Zoomer’s bird nest perm, turned right around and hired Thomas Kenniff, a Republican candidate who ran for Manhattan’s D.A office. Kenniff is an advocate for a return to broken windows policing policies: his main focus for running was reducing gun crime by “cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.” During his debate with eventual Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, he said the following: “As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years.”
Kenniff is yet another New York law and order lizard in the long line of Ed Koch and COBA, sunning himself on the rock of Long Island while dictating whether or not Manhattan is safe. I don’t believe in accidents; I don’t think Daniel Penny was trying out wrestling moves, and I don’t think he happened to find a lawyer who just so happened to be the kind of person who would support Daniel Penny. Whether or not Penny intended to kill Jordan Neely, and fifteen minutes is a hell of a long time to hold a rear-naked chokehold if you’re not, is immaterial to me: he’s dead. I have been in a variety of situations with homeless people who aren’t all there: I’ve worked with them, I’ve handed them library books, I’ve been stopped on the street by them. I’ve been unnerved, I’ve been annoyed, I’ve been upset with them, even to the point I’ve confronted them, and never once have I choked anybody out.
But to an upsetting number of people, that someone would pierce the sanctity of a subway car is evidence of yet another one of New York’s apocalypses. I don’t know high of a self-regard you have to have to insist that your city is so special the world is ending there constantly, but I’ve never even been to New York, so clearly I don’t Get It; these homeless apocalypses are one of those mysterious little features I don’t understand about the United States' biggest city, like convenience stores you can get a sandwich at. But among the dudgeon of What Is Happening To Our City and He Was No Angel was the constant evocation of comfort.
What if, the comfort hawks ask, you were in the car and a woman was uncomfortable? Would you like to have a man saying he wants to die in your subway car? And most risible are the people who twisted criticism of the event in a seemingly radical direction: actually, it’s patriarchy even when a black man is screaming on a subway bus, the working class deserves comfort on the way to work. Don’t white women bleed? Don’t they deserve the full comfort and safety of not sitting in the train car with brutes, ready to take them away? It is entirely a diversionary tactic: by moving from the real drivers of these incidences into a scapegoat argument about what’s comfortable or not, you can ignore that Daniel Penny walked away and Jordan Neely did not.
The fear of black this constitutes so much of the relationship white people have with black people in this country; so much so that blackness takes on the air of an ambient threat. And when these white people, even the ones who abhor wokeness and critical race theory and that society has progressed beyond the need for shitty indie movies by downtown provocateurs, they sanctify safe spaces by blood; a train car, a front porch, endless places become where black ritual sacrifice burns into the historical record a sigil for protecting the pure white souls. The job of the truly hateful is to alleviate the burden of the fearful by allowing themselves to turn that fearful anxiety into the violent enforcement of the social code: through terror, threats, and the discontents that result from that enforcement, a currency where the possibility of violence backs up the value like the gold standard. Everyone else is just a coward.
The continued beating of fearful drums does nothing but run cover for yet another state sanctioned black death. New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s statement was more focused on whether homeless people should be on the subway than on whether or not somebody was murdered, New York Democratic Mayor Eric Adams responded to comptroller Brad Lander’s statement that “We must not become a city where a mentally ill human being can be choked to death by a vigilante without consequence. Or where the killer is justified & cheered,” by screaming about a tweet causing interference in the DA’s investigation. If you had to typify what was really being said, it was in Kathy Hochul’s vague statement: “There are consequences for behavior.”
The consequences are obvious, but what has to be defined for those consequences is the behavior. American society, already acutely paranoid, has only grown in severity, and aberrant behavior will only face those consequences, and the range of who is aberrant and who is not will only grow bigger. In the mean time, there will be safaris, and the safaris will lead to lynchings. Only there will be no postcards as tokens of the day, but video.