Let’s Unpack the Way Media Has Been Covering Jordan Neely’s Death
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Instagram
Content warning: This newsletter contains descriptions of a homicide, as well as anti-Black racism. It also contains context links to news articles that may include photos and video of Jordan Neely’s death.
On Monday, a 24-year-old white man whose name we don’t (officially) know killed a 30-year-old Black man named Jordan Neely on a New York City subway.
Neely was a talented, charismatic subway performer who had been perfecting his Michael Jackson impersonation since at least 2009. A friend of his told Gothamist that they’d met in foster care and that Neely would pay for other kids’ food or haircuts with the money he made busking, but that recently he had been experiencing homelessness and struggled with his mental health.
On Monday afternoon, he may have been in the midst of a mental health crisis. He was definitely tired, and hungry and thirsty. There’s no way he wasn’t scared.
Freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez told the New York Post that Neely “start[ed] to make a speech,” while on the northbound F train. “He started screaming in an aggressive manner. He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground,” Vazquez said.
At that point, the 24-year-old passenger, who the Post identified as a U.S. Marine veteran (and who Twitter users have identified as Daniel Penny, though this hasn’t been confirmed), came up behind Neely and put him in a chokehold, keeping him there for 15 minutes while he struggled and tried to get free. At least two other passengers helped hold Neely down until he stopped resisting. Eventually, the conductor stopped the train and called 911, but Neely had lost consciousness by that point and EMS workers couldn’t revive him.
We have had moments like this before, and it is both exhausting and tragic that we keep having the same conversations about race, mental illness, homelessness, who has access to social services, whose life is considered valuable, who our society even sees as human. But even if it feels repetitive, it’s worse not to say anything, I think. Especially when it comes to media coverage of this situation. So, let’s talk about it.
The framing of early media coverage was often deeply problematic
I started seeing headlines and tweets about Neely’s killing on Wednesday morning and immediately noticed some patterns (emphasis mine):
“Shocking video shows NYC subway passenger putting unhinged man in deadly chokehold.” (The New York Post.)
“Video shows former US Marine, 24, putting violent subway passenger in chokehold before the homeless man passed out and died in hospital.” (The Daily Mail.)
“A 30-year-old man died on the subway on Monday after he was placed in a chokehold, the police said. Witnesses said the victim had been acting in a ‘hostile and erratic manner’ toward passengers on the train when the other man, 24, moved to restrain him.” (The New York Times.)
There are three things I think are worth calling out here. First, these outlets are deliberating using inflammatory and dehumanizing language—and it’s not even accurate. If we go back to Vazquez’s description of Neely’s behaviour before the Marine began strangling him, is there really anything that’s worthy of being described as “unhinged” or “violent”? He screamed that he had nothing to eat or drink, that he was tired and that he didn’t care if he went to jail, then threw his jacket on the ground. Maybe that behaviour made other passengers feel uncomfortable, but it wasn’t violent. However, the Post and the Daily Mail described it that way for the same reason those passengers interpreted it as violent: in white supremacist societies like ours, Blackness and mental illness shape people’s perception of someone like Neely as undesirable, and even sub-human—which makes it easier for them to parse their feelings of discomfort over ‘erratic’ behaviour as infringements on their sense of safety, which they can then use to justify their violence. (Cops use this tactic all the time, FYI.)
Another thing it’s really important to acknowledge is the use of passive voice in much of this reporting. This is something I talk to my students about all the time, and forgive me if this feels nitpicky, but: when we write or speak in active voice, the subject of a sentence performs an action. In passive voice, though, the subject receives the action. Take this paragraph from the Post article: “Neely—who was living on the streets and had a history of mental health issues—lost consciousness after being put in the chokehold, and EMS workers at the station were unable to revive him, police and law enforcement sources said.” There’s no mention of who, exactly, put Neely in that chokehold, which helps to obfuscate what happened and, I would argue, rhetorically shift the blame onto Neely himself. This wording provides justification for the violence that was perpetrated against him, while simultaneously absolving the Marine of responsibility and even autonomy. It almost describes an unavoidable sequence of events, like a wildfire or a flood—things that are negative, but not under our control. Conversely, in active voice, this would be much clearer: “A fellow passenger choked Neely until he lost consciousness and died.” The NYT tweet that frames the story around a man ‘dying on the subway’ functions in a similar way. Did he die on the subway? Or did someone kill him?
As The New Republic contributing editor Nick Martin put it in a 2020 article about journalists’ decision to use passive voice when describing the protests sparked by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd, “passive voice removes a subject from the focus of a sentence, instead choosing to look at the action or reaction caused by the subject. Effectively… it’s a way to evasively describe who, exactly, is causing the violence… As both social media and the evening news are staple sources for people looking for real-time updates, it is necessary to ensure that when people turn to these sources, the framing is not just fair but correct. Equating militarized police units armed with tanks, lethal and nonlethal guns and riot gear with protesters standing against the violence doled out by them is not just cowardice but an intentional distortion of reality. ‘Protests turn violent,’ read the chyron of a local Salt Lake City news channel as the station aired video of police officers using their riot shields to shove an elderly man with a cane to the ground.
Lastly, it makes me uncomfortable when journalists uncritically take their cues from law enforcement, because they are often wrong and biased. (Also: that’s how you perpetuate copaganda.) I do understand why some outlets are being cagey about calling Neely’s death murder, even though New York City’s medical examiner classified it a homicide via chokehold on Wednesday. This is an attempt to ward off libel lawsuits; the medical examiner’s office “noted that any determination about criminal culpability would be left to the legal system,” according to the Associated Press. (And yes, police certainly do seem to be taking their time figuring that out—the Marine was taken into custody and questioned, but released without charges.) I’m less sure why some outlets seemingly had confirmation of his name and opted not to publish it. I’m being careful about using his name because I don’t have confirmation, but the New York Post tried to interview him! According to the paper, “He declined to comment when reached by The Post Tuesday, saying, ‘I am not interested in answering any questions, thank you.’” And at one point, the Daily Mail actually did include his last name in a photo caption, though it wasn’t anywhere else in the story. That’s a strong indicator that the paper initially planned to name him, until editors decided against it. (It has now been removed from the story, of course.) There are real ethical issues around naming criminal suspects, and some papers are trying to rectify past harm by only identifying people who have been formally charged with a crime, which this Marine hasn’t been. But I’m having trouble with that approach in this case because it reads to me as almost colluding with police to protect someone who wouldn’t be afforded this benefit if not for his race and military service.
The next wave of coverage—humanizing stories—has already begun
I think Gothamist’s piece that includes the story about using his busking money to take care of his friends was the first to try to paint a fuller portrait of Neely, but it wasn’t the last. When these things happen—and by ‘these things,’ I mean when innocent Black people are murdered—we very predictably feel moved to prove that they were, in fact, innocent, or at least that didn’t deserve to be killed. So, Gothamist explained that Neely was a decent guy who had been failed by various, increasingly under-funded, social services, and talked about how his mental illness seemed to have started after his mother’s abusive boyfriend killed her when he was 14, which… yeah, I think anyone can see how that would’ve happened. He had to testify at the murder trial four years later, which must have been extremely traumatizing. And later, his mental health struggles were exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t have stable housing.
Yesterday evening, Curbed published a similarly moving article about the community of Michael Jackson impersonators who are mourning one of their own. And Defector staff writer Albert Burneko wrote a powerful piece that asks the exact questions I have been asking myself. You should definitely read in full—it’s not long, but every word hits: “I'm struggling to put this into words. I can't tell if it's because what I'm trying to express is ludicrous or because it's so dully obvious that I've never bothered to actually think of how to say it before. Sometimes you have something that somebody else needs more than you do, and you can afford to spare it, and the easiest thing in the world is just to give it to them. In that moment, to have what you can give them is, itself, a gift, a thing to be thankful for. In my lifetime this society has seemed ever more fanatically opposed to that possibility, and ever more committed to the idea that of all the things a vulnerable person might legitimately need, help—simple material help—is never one of them. But, like, how many people were on that train? How come nobody just, like, offered Jordan Neely a swig from their water bottle? Or, hell, tried to pry off the guy literally strangling him to death right there on the floor? Did any of them have anything at all they could give to the person first suffering, and then just straight-up dying, right in front of them? Thirty years is no time at all. Jordan Neely was a squishy little toddler yesterday, a gangly kid 10 minutes ago. At 30 he had no place to live… That was Jordan Neely's whole and only life. It ended when he walked into a room full of people, homeless and hungry and thirsty and tired, and they helped themselves to his silence.”
None of this is that different from how people reacted when Aurora, Colorado police killed Elijah McClain in 2019. McClain was a vegetarian who spent his lunch breaks playing violin for cats at the local animal shelter because he worried they were lonely. He was gentle and quirky, not a threat to anyone. And… I feel conflicted about this type of description. On one hand, I found these articles about Neely really powerful, and I appreciated getting a more complete sense of who he was. I also think it’s so natural to want to call attention to someone’s humanity in a situation like this, because I think we’re operating under the belief that if ‘they’ can just see these people the way we do, they’ll understand why these killings are unjust. (So yes, I did do this exact thing at the beginning of this newsletter.)
At the same time, though, we have to be careful that we don’t unintentionally play into white supremacist respectability politics. As Melissa Pandika wrote in Mic in 2020, “fixating on how the innocence of a victim of police violence made them undeserving of their death implies that those who had less-than-spotless pasts did deserve their fate. By the same token, the victims' loved ones and others demanding justice for them shouldn’t have to prove that they didn't deserve to be killed by police — which only highlights that their lives were devalued to begin with… The perfect victim narrative essentially creates a hierarchy of victims whose lives had more value than those of others, explains Shardé Davis, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Connecticut. Conversations and media coverage might focus on, say, how they were highly educated, played a musical instrument, volunteered, or had other qualities that a society built on whiteness considers valuable.”
By that logic, isn’t trying to generate empathy for Neely by calling attention to his sweetness or decency or tough breaks in life just the reverse to having to defend Michael Brown when the New York Times branded him “no angel,” or pushing back against racists who said Oscar Grant’s stint in prison, Eric Garner illegally selling cigarettes and Trayvon Martin smoking weed somehow justified their respective murders? They’re two sides of the same unfair coin. Of course, because white supremacist trolls are nothing if not predictable, we are also talking about Neely in this context, because they’re already pointing to his previous interactions with law enforcement as ‘proof’ that he somehow deserved to die.
We have to talk about how people are circulating the photos and video of Neely’s death
The last media literacy-ish thing I want to note is how many times I saw Neely dying on my timeline this week. Lots of people have written about images of Black death as trauma porn and why we should take care in how we disseminate them (including me), but this week, it was very difficult to avoid. They were in news stories and retweeted onto my feed; I even accidentally retweeted something without realizing that it quoted another tweet that contained photos of Neely dying, as well as his dead body.
But for most people, sharing these images wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate act, maybe intended to shock people out of their complacency or as an attempt at allyship, but misguided regardless of intention. There are all sorts of cultural taboos against showing images of dead bodies—just look at how Refinery29 approached a 2014 story about a photo essay featuring dead bodies by photography Cathrine Ertmann—and yet this care never seems to apply to Black people, and especially Black men. I talked about this when Migos rapper Takeoff died and TMZ published photos of his dead body; showing Black people’s dead bodies in this way isn’t just disrespectful and dehumanizing, it also subtly signals that violent death is both normal for this group of people, and simultaneously distant from white audiences’ lives. And that doesn’t even get into the issue of monetizing Black death, which is what an outlet like the Post is doing when it sells ad space on the same page that it publishes these images.
… And I don’t know, guys. I don’t have a smart conclusion here, other than to say: It is deeply sad to see that, after three years of fairly intense conversation about racial injustice (following decades of less mainstream conversation), media outlets are still making the same racist, fucked up mistakes. It is deeply sad that some journalists know Penny’s name, but they’re opting to protect him, a courtesy they generally do not extend to people who have been accused of crimes, even when it’s not caught on video. It is deeply sad to look at photos of someone dying, or dead, and try to understand how everyone around them can look so calm. It is deeply sad to realize that someone could beg for food and water and care, and not only be denied, but actually killed for his trouble.
It is all just so deeply sad.
And Did You Hear About…
Those gnome-hunting TikToks—which are actually recruiting tools for white nationalists.
This thread of TV shows Twitter users are convinced no one else but them watched.
The New Yorker’s longread about Dubai’s “fugitive princesses.”
Writer Josh Gondelman on why the Writers Guild of America membership is striking.
Jezebel’s breakdown of all the weird things King Charles’ coronation will include, which constitutes the exact amount of attention I plan to pay to this thing.
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