Being (and) Nothing
White Public Authority, “Separate Sphere” Ideology, and the Murder of Jordan Neely
What does it mean to have a body that has been made into a grammar for whole worlds of meaning? –C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides
Precisely because they are imagined as sexual demons, Black men and boys are not seen as human—Tamari Kitossa
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Video footage of Jordan Neely’s final, lethal[i] encounter has been all over social media for days, though it took about a week of pressure for the name of his murderer to be released. Since his death, there has been a déluge of commentary fervently seeking to construct Neely as monstrous. For days the identity of his white assailant remained a mystery. Eventually, the murderer in question was identified as Daniel Penny, a 24-year old Marine and college student said to have been “accused” of strangling Jordan Neely—dinge, homeless, panhandler, amorphous—to death on a public train. Marine veteran accused in NYC subway chokehold death identified by his lawyer.
Penny joined the Marines in 2017 according to his LinkedIn profile and is currently a college student, according to a statement released by his attorneys at Raiser&Kenniff. (Fox News)
According to the Daily News, Neely suffered from schizophrenia, and had been homeless for about four years after moving out of his father’s home. There is a picture in the article showing Daniel Penny looking directly at the camera, Jordan Neely’s face sandwiched between both his arms, fading. Prior to his death, Neely was said to have been shouting and pacing:
“I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” Neely declared after boarding the F train at the Second Ave. stop in the Bowery. “I don’t mind if I go to jail and (get) life in prison … I’m ready to die.” (Daily News)
Penny’s lawyer is said to be Thomas Kenniff, the 2021 opponent of the NYC District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Apparently he was against bail reform laws and criminal justice reforms suggested by the Democratic Party. Other outlets have published accounts seasoned with bullshit about how Neely’s erratic behavior made them fear for their safety. Hence, Penny presumably acted to protect himself and the other passengers. Neely’s death was ruled a homicide, yet authorities are, as of this writing, weighing whether or not to press charges.
Twitter is currently glutted with threads by “radical feminists” and their ilk taking this opportunity to complain about homeless men harassing them, characterizing them as rapacious vagrants who need to be “removed” from public space. This echoes a similar sentiment found on a Feminist Currents article that popped up while I was researching homelessness for this article. The article, “Protecting men at the women’s shelter,” was written by an anonymous (presumably white) female/woman who details her experience working at a shelter for homeless women in Maine. She writes:
In the time that I have worked at the shelter, men have always been welcome to stay alongside the women, on one condition: the men must tell us they are women. They may refer to themselves by “feminine” names or dress in “feminine” attire, but we do not require they do these things — who are we, after all, to police anyone’s gender expression? As long as a man claims that he is a woman, our doors are open to him.
Obviously she is talking about (around) trans women. While she notes that some of the “men” are “harmless enough,” she then goes on to outline several incidents of male and trans deviance involving leering at other women, pestering other shelter inhabitants for dates and/or blowjobs, masturbation in bed at night, “lurking,” making women uncomfortable by looking at them, breathing masculinely, inspiring terror by being present, using “feminine” pronouns, and existing so hard that some women literally can’t sleep. She goes on to claim that none of the incidents were taken seriously by staff, who simply brushed them off and continued to use “she” pronouns to cover up the fact that: “Women do not treat other women the way men treat women. Women do not do to other women what men do to women.”[ii] The anonymous writer does not address race in any of her commentary. Black people make up less than 2 percent of Maine’s population.[iii] A 2022 Point in Time Survey shows that Maine’s homeless population is disproportionately black (and “mixed” or nonwhite) and disproportionately male, with the sexual categories of “male” and “female” concealing and subsuming trans persons.[iv] In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton proposes black(ness) as appositional[v] to “trans,” describing them as “expressed in terms of a disavowal.” He writes: “[R]ace and gender are inextricably linked yet irreconcilable and irreducible projects. To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience” (8). Trans as in movement, as in fungible (chattel, commutable).
Public, Private, Plantation (Logics)
Detractors and bigots, styling themselves as “radical feminists,” concerned (white) citizens, and female or feminine victims, cited a fear of universal male violence, claiming that Jordan Neely was guilty of harassing a woman (and her child), characterizing Daniel Penny as a “good Samaritan.” This will likely serve as his defense as well. In the midst of the furor and fury over Neely’s death, two Twitter push notifications popped up on my phone in rapid succession. One was a short thread by the user @lumpen_princess:
“if you think that the main object of feminist critique rn should be black mentally ill homeless men as opposed to white men engaged in vigilante murder in the name of protecting ‘public space’, you fundamentally do not understand who the patriarchs in our society are”
“the violence enacted on jordan neely for being black, poor and mentally ill in public is the same patriarchal violence which deems public spaces as dangerous (i.e. implicitly male) to urge women to remain within the domestic sphere”[vi]
My Twitter timeline is full of retweets from white liberal feminists pushing back and blaming the separate spheres paradigm. But although their feminism is “intersectional,” they can’t seem to shake their overreliance on white/Euro-American sex/gender paradigms. This is because feminism and progressivism are at the root humanistic ideologies, even when they’re “queered.” Humanist paradigms in a white supremacist nation automatically exclude nonwhites from consideration. A “homeless,” or vagrant, is not a human. A “black” is not a human. They are both representations which exist outside of the realm of (white) humanity. They have no interiority. Reason and rationality elude them. They exist only to terrorize humans, to live and die inside our nightmares. They are the thing humans must strive not to be. They are all the more terrifying because they pretend to be human when, in fact, they are monsters. To be a vagrant is to be transitive, to be vermin. It is a state of unbelonging.[vii]
@lumpen_princess named this “patriarchal violence.” Thanks to social media, specifically memes, the term patriarchy has experienced a full-on resurgence, the likes of which haven’t be seen since the 1960s-1980s, when black and Chicana feminists—including bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the Combahee River Collective—critiqued it down to the marrow for its inattention to race, socioeconomic status, and other factors. A 2021 paper by Rosemary Hill and Kim Allen critiques the term as “primarily a theory about women who live cis, heterosexual lives.”
Referring to the phrase “the patriarchy,” Hill and Allen state “…the use of ‘patriarchy’ online maintains its bias towards middle-class, white women’s concerns, i.e. prioritising gender, to the neglect of black, minority ethnic, working-class, lesbian, bisexual and transwomen’s particular experiences of oppression.” They conclude that the reductive use of this term threatens the integrity of feminist arguments and risks minimizing racial and sexual concerns outside of white, Western female experience.[viii] Attempting to remedy this issue, Pauline Schloesser offers a modification: racial patriarchy. “[R]acial patriarchy developed from a convergence of human agreements on white supremacy and male supremacy that privileged white males, especially those with property, above everyone else.” (emphasis mine)[ix] It begs the question: Which humans?
The work of Louise Michelle Newman, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Tamari Kitossa, and Katerina Deliovsky demonstrate that the power conferred through whiteness is in no way, shape, or form diminished or otherwise minimized by femininity. Femininity is in fact enhanced and manipulated through whiteness. Thus to shift the blame over to white men by theorizing that Jordan Neely’s death was due to the “separate spheres” designation of public versus private—public connoting wild, dangerous, masculine space—is to reify the notion of white feminine innocence.[x] Deliovsky writes:
As a consequence of circumventing questions of racialized gender power within the histories of colonialism and slavery, white women are granted “innocence” (Wekker, 2016) and are imagined to be without power. […] …black masculinity is imagined to be inherently complicit in patriarchy if not conferred the status of patriarchy itself.
One thing that stood out to me in Schloesser’s rearticulation of patriarchy as racial is that it continues the feminist tradition of disentangling racial and sexual ideology by implicitly promoting black men from brute to human. When followed by Crenshaw’s juridical formation of intersectionality this leads one to the conclusion that there is such a thing as black male supremacy. But the racial is always sexual, and vice versa. Tamari Kitossa writes that white womanhood “…confers racial patriarchal authority to White women, ensur[ing] that they are complicit with the reproduction of White patriarchal supremacy. As such, White women through White womanhood are active agents in the sexual psychopathology of White supremacy.”[xi] Figuring white women as active agents of white supremacy is a direct challenge to the feminist concept of patriarchy. Black people and the homeless, are excluded from both public and domestic (private) spheres, which exist as a mechanism and extension of white authority over. This revision of yet-quintessential separate spheres ideology encompasses white masculine and feminine power and the disempowerment of those dispossessed. Reframing Neely’s death as a result of patriarchal violence designed to “urge women to remain within the domestic sphere” refocuses the issue from a white female perspective and presupposes the category of “woman” as universal.
Previously I have come under fire for my racial critiques of the term cisgender as constitutive of white heterosexual norms and proposed that black sexualities lie in excess of the cis/trans paradigm, which I feel forecloses more (carnal) possibilities than it generates. Following Hortense Spiller’s concept of ungendering, I proposed that black former slaves would be better described as dysgendered, always prefigured and transfigured by and through the concept of blackness.[xii] The black female-feminine-feminized body is always already prostituted[xiii], presumed public/violable. Similarly, the black male-masculine-masculinized body is marked as a “putative philanderer or rapist.” All are sites of contamination, bodies marked as primal. They are liminal, tied to the plantation, a space devoid of domesticity (private) and politics (public). These social spaces, separate spheres, are maintained as a form of ecological conservation to protect their white constituents from invasive species and seek to justify any and all actions undertaken by white authoritative figures meting out racialized violence in the name of eradicating danger.
The danger which is/was Jordan Neely.
The Violence of Vagary
The other push notification I received was for a tweet by Fox News, containing an article, published May 6, 2023. The headline read: Black man charged with murdering two White strangers in Oklahoma because of their race. The title by itself is incendiary. One wonders why they used the word “strangers,” rather than “victims.” Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be any video circulating, no pornotropic violence of white bodies falling, bleeding, or exploding.
The article stated that a 61- year old homeless man named Carlton Gilford has apparently been charged with the homicide of two white men in Tulsa (Oklahoma). Carlton Gilford was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of shooting with intent to kill, and one count of malicious intimidation or harassment (hate crime). Police allege that Gilford attempted to shoot himself in the head in between the two shootings and was hospitalized upon being apprehended. The Black Wall Street Times called it a “shooting spree.” Multiple outlets described this as a racially motivated hate crime. They offer no clear proof of this assertion beyond the fact that Gilford is “black” and his victims were “white.” Said the Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler:
“[T]he evidence suggests that race plays a role in it. I feel like that is something we can prove, and it is something that a judge or jury needs to listen to. So, we will present that information along with everything else.”[xiv] Tulsa Police say that when law enforcement showed up, Gilford readily admitted to both murders.
The last time Gilford had police contact on record was in 2013. I did a series of searches of Carlton Gilford’s name, along with keywords and found a 2013 article titled “Code blue: TulsaPeople looks at the factors behind Oklahoma’s reputation as one of the nation’s unhealthiest states.” At the top is a picture of Carlton Gilford and the psychiatrist Dr. Nicole Washington having a home visit. The article states:
The United Health Foundation ranks Oklahoma No. 43 in overall health. Oklahoma also is among the 10 worst for its primary care physician shortage, cardiovascular deaths, smoking, mental illness, premature death, diabetes and obesity, and ranks 24th for children in poverty.
Washington is employed by the University of Oklahoma as part of an Integrated Multidisciplinary Program of Assertive Community Treatment — or IMPACT — team. This collaborative approach to medicine is required to treat not only mental illness, but also the other chronic ails of Oklahomans, including heart disease, obesity and diabetes, says Dr. Gerard Clancy, president of OU-Tulsa and himself a practicing psychiatrist.
Tulsa Police maintain that Gilford is of sound mind. Tulsa’s first black Chief of Police, Wendell Franklin, described Gilford as “estranged from his family but […] a functioning individual.” One article states that Gilford has a record dating back to 1998. Records show that though Gilford was booked into Tulsa Jail “on complaints of child abuse, assault and battery, and driving without a seat belt,” charges were never filed. The HRW stated in their report on Tulsa policing that “…Tulsa police more frequently stopped drivers in areas that tend to be poorer and with predominantly Black populations than the rest of the city.” They also show that “[t]raffic stops are not only more frequent in the predominately black and poor sections of the city but they also last longer, with a greater likelihood of removal from the vehicle, search, questioning and arrest.” In 2013 Gilford was arrested “on misdemeanor charges of transporting a loaded firearm in a vehicle and eluding police.” He pled guilty, relinquished his firearm, and was sentenced to one year, with all but seventeen days suspended. Gilford apparently listed himself as homeless then, and had no more police contact after that, until now.
The city of Tulsa is extremely segregated; their policing practices continue to reflect that. The Human Rights Watch called Tulsa, Oklahoma a case study in “abusive, overly aggressive policing.” According to their study, Policing, Poverty, and Racial Inequality in Tulsa, Oklahoma:
North Tulsa, (defined here as north of Highway 244) home to 17% of Tulsa’s population, holds 41% of Tulsa’s Black population. Many census tracts in northwest Tulsa are over 80% Black. More than 35% of north Tulsa’s population lives in poverty compared with 17% in the rest of the city. Citywide, the Black poverty rate is 34% while the white poverty rate is 13%. The unemployment rate is 12.2% in north Tulsa and 5.7% in the rest of the city. The unemployment rate for Black Tulsans is over twice the rate for White Tulsans.
Justice Report described Tulsa as being plagued with “acts of unspeakable Black violence",” and also referenced replacement theory, stating that “the non-Hispanic White population of Tulsa Oklahoma barely holds onto majority status at a precarious 53.4%. The number has fallen sharply, when, in 2010, non-Hispanic Whites comprised 62.6% of Tulsa’s population. In the modern day, standing next to a growing Black population of 14.8%, rests a sizeable 17% Hispanic population, as well as a non-Hispanic mixed-race population of 6.2%.” They added that: “Tragic tales of innocent White people falling victim to gun violence at the hands of Black men are becoming increasingly common in the United States.” The article claimed that Wendell Franklin “remained silent on the obvious racial element at play.”
In the book Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out, black vegan activist Aph Ko challenges us to connect the issues of animal liberation and (para)human liberation, recognizing that “being associated with animals is cause for our own disposability.” (20) Ko engages Korean-American professor Claire Jean Kim’s concept of zoological racism and argues that intersectionality doesn’t resist colonial categorical thinking, but instead reaffirms it. “Intersectionality is more like one highway crossing over another highway. From an aerial view, this could look like two roads intersecting, but they are actually two separate and distinct roads with two different heights, and in between them is a gap—a void.” (14)[xv] On September 22, 2021 by Tucker Carlson presented a media segment titled: “Nothing About What’s Happening Is an Accident,” and posited his version of race suicide, the “Great Replacement Theory.” On September 30, 2021, KTUL ABC 8 News published an article titled “Tulsa becomes majority-minority city.” Majority-minority is yet another way of espousing racial replacement theory. The phrasing is designed to stoke white male racial-sexual aggression by implicitly referencing white men’s seeming sociopolitical impotence and diminishing racial power in the face of random, irrational, black male-perpetrated violence. A similar impulse helped spur the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars[xvi]. Gilford’s alleged victims are portrayed as unsuspecting prey, guilty only of being white and existing. This is a question of racial and sexual power. This is a question of white manhood. Sal Nicolazzo writes, in Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of Police, that “race works as a fiction for articulating relations to labor, accumulation, and dispossession.”
Articles covering Jordan Neely’s death contain stills showing Penny with Neely in a chokehold. Allegedly he was strangled for almost 15 minutes. Daniel Penny, however, is presumed to have been acting in self-defense despite all evidence to the contrary. I have yet to see any video footage related to the Tulsa murders. Multiple publications in other countries somehow saw fit to publish about Gilford’s case. Among them were ADN America and ABD Post, a rightwing newsletter written in Turkish covering American news and located in New Castle, Delaware[xvii]. Writes Ko:
“As soon as we see which body is being violated, we file their experience of injustice in a specific conceptual filing cabinet, which forces us to think about their liberation through a specific limiting filter. […] Looking at a victim’s body and having a reflex that guides how we should immediately perceive the problem and the solution, we are already missing certain dimensions of the violation, and are thus limited in our tools to create adequate solutions.” (11-13)
Gilford is expected to be sentenced on June 23rd.
*Please see these endnotes below for further commentary and sources that were not linked in the body of the article, and please Like this post and/or subscribe.
[i] The word lethal is traced back to the late 16th century, from Late Latin lethalis, an alteration of letalis (“deadly, fatal”). Latelis is said to have descended from the term lethum/letum, which means “death.” Lethum is speculated to have been altered in Late Latin by its association with lēthēs hydor, or “water of oblivion,” in Hades in Greek mythology, from the word lēthē, which means “forgetfulness,” “oblivion,” and “concealment.” It is related to the Classical Greek term aletheaia (“truth”). Lēthē, also known as Lesmosyne and Amelēs potamos (river of unmindfulness), also refers to one of the five mystical rivers of the underworld (Hades), whose water causes amnesia when drunk. The name also refers to a daughter of Eris, a personification of forgetfulness/oblivion.
[ii] Although the author characterizes each of these sketches as separate incidents, later in the essay she admits that one of the more violent incidents (where a trans woman allegedly threatened to shoot some of the staff) was actually committed by the same person accused of masturbating in bed at night which she called “public masturbation,” due to the fact that it was in a space with multiple beds. Link: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/09/13/protecting-men-at-the-womens-shelter/
[iii] See: Maine Voices: Homelessness is a racial justice issue in Maine, too: https://www.pressherald.com/2020/07/10/maine-voices-homelessness-is-a-racial-justice-issue-in-maine-too/#:~:text=Black%20people%20represent%20less%20than,in%20the%20count%20were%20minorities.; See also: New report shows Black people, homeless arrested at much higher rate in South Portland: https://fox23maine.com/news/local/new-report-shows-black-people-homeless-arrested-much-higher-rate-south-portland-arrests-unhoused-white-race-african-maine; See also: ‘People are becoming stuck’: Survey finds Maine’s homeless population is growing: https://www.wmtw.com/article/people-stuck-survey-maines-homeless-population-growing/40006016#
[iv] Please see my Glossary article, “Radical, as in “Root” to see how I use terms. For exact numbers from the 2022 Maine State Housing Authority PIT, please see this link:
https://www
.mainehousing.org/docs/default-source/housing-reports/2022-point-in-time-survey---statewide.pdf?sfvrsn=1aa68615_7
[v] Apposition is defined as “the positioning of things or the condition of being side by side or close together.” Further it is “a relationship between two or more words or phrases in which the two units are grammatically parallel and have the same referent.” For example: my cousin Jasmin; my son Gregory.
Apposition - Wikipedia
https://twitter.com/lumpen_princess/status/1654757826286219264?t=0K_wdjoBk7E5ne7qL_Niww&s=19
https://twitter.com/lumpen_princess/status/1654757828446265344?t=Tm1Lm1oEkl9I4SFgFOdk7w&s=19
[vii] See: Sal Niccolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of Police.
[viii] ‘Smash the patriarchy’: the changing meanings and work of ‘patriarchy’ online, Rosemary Lucy Hill and Kim Allen, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464700120988643
[ix] See: Pauline Schloesser, The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic.
[x] See: Katerina Deliovsky: “White Femininity, Black Masculinity, Sex/Romance Tourism, and the Politics of Feminist Theory: Theorizing Desire and Erotic Racism” in Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism.
[xi] See: Tamari Kitossa, Introduction, and “Can the Black Man Be Nude in a Culture That Imagines Him as Naked? A Baldwinian and Fanonian Psychosexual Reading of Black Masculinity in “Western” Art and Cinema,” in the anthology Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism.
[xii] For me, “ungendered” is distinct from “dysgendered” in that the prefix un- connotes absence of gender. Un- means “not.” A secondary definition is one of negation: “reversal, deprivation, or removal.” Source: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=un-
The prefix dys- specifically means bad, hard, unlucky, evil, difficult, abnormal, or imperfect, and traces its lineage back to the Greek inseparable prefix of the same, meaning “destroying the good sense of a word or increasing its bad sense.” Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/dys-?ref=etymonline_crossreference
[xiii] My use of the term “prostituted” here is deliberate, and has nothing to do with “sex work” as conceived of in the current white/Western cultural imaginary. Prostituted conveys something that is done to you, rather than something done of your own volition. It also means “to offer publicly (as a slave).” My use of the term reflects that.
[xiv] Black man charged with racially motivated double murder, ADN America. Acción Democrática Nacionalista is a right-wing political party in Bolivia. Black man charged with murdering two White strangers in Oklahoma because of their race, Fox News.
[xv] Ko continues: “Intersectionality is more like one highway crossing over another highway. From an aerial view, this could look like two roads intersecting but they are actually two separate and distinct roads with two different heights, and in between them is a gap- a void. It’s an illusion of an intersection at a distance, however. When you
lose the distance and start to approach this supposed intersection, you immediately see the roads are not even touching.
For true liberation, I do not encourage intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking; I encourage un-disciplinary” thinking.” The only way forward is to transcend disciplinary logic. The disciplines themselves (race, gender, class, etc.) are already infected with coloniality. The social categories were born out of an oppressive system -the very system activists are claiming to fight. Making colonized social categories “intersect” doesn’t rid the structure of coloniality and it bypasses the work we need to do within the categories themselves.”
For further reading, see: Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out
See also: Claire Kim: Are Asians the New Blacks? Affirmative Action, Antiblackness, and the Sociometry of Race:
[xvi] See: Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars by Kristin L. Hoganson
[xvii] When I searched ‘abdpost’ this address popped up: 607 Deemer Pl Suite 498, New Castle, DE 19720. From Muck Rack: ABDPOST.COM is an online newspaper that covers politics, public safety, business, culture and education news about Turkish and Muslim-majority American cities such as New York, New Jersey and Paterson. Here is their sourcelink: https://www.abdpost.com/s/abdpost-com-hakkinda-23.html