In my Films of Moral Struggle class, we do a unit on cinematic depictions of policing. I’ve assigned different movies in different semesters—Dirty Harry, Fruitvale Station, Queen & Slim—but one constant has been the essay “Endangered/Endangering” by Judith Butler.1 As my students are quick to remind me, the prose can be challenging—true to form, Butler writes like a Berkeley comp lit professor—but the core insight has been rattling around my head in the wake of the vigilante killing of Jordan Neely, the mentally ill man who was choked to death on a New York City subway last week.
Butler wrote the piece in response to the LAPD’s 1991 beating of Rodney King. It observes that many who watched the now infamous camcorder footage of the attack, including both the lawyers for the police officers involved and the jury that acquitted them, appeared less concerned with the actual violence being recorded than the hypothetical violence they imagined King could have committed had the cops not mercilessly pummeled him. Pushing back on this interpretation, Butler writes:
The video shows a man being brutally beaten, repeatedly, and without visible resistance; and so the question is, How could this video be used as evidence that the body being beaten was itself the source of danger, the threat of violence, and, further, that the beaten body of Rodney King bore an intention to injure, and to injure precisely those police who either wielded the baton against him or stood encircling him?
Such a sleight of hand has, of course, been repeated time and again by cops and vigilantes in the decades since Butler wrote those words. Even as the video footage unquestionably showed Derek Chauvin committing a deadly assault on George Floyd, his lawyers encouraged the jury and the public to imagine that the (predominantly Black) crowd pleading for Floyd’s life constituted a “potential deadly assault that’s about to happen.” Defenders of Daniel Penny, the man who choked Neely to death, make the same case, asking people to focus not on the violence that the ex-Marine really did commit, but on the violence the Neely might commit. What you see, they insist, is excused by what you don’t.
None of the available witness statements claim that Neely had done more than yell and throw trash. The freelance journalist who recorded the encounter has himself estimated that 98 out of 100 bystanders would’ve waited for further signs of aggression before initiating a physical confrontation, and one person who tried to intervene on Neely’s behalf told reporters, “I was intimidated by Daniel Penny.” Even Bernie Goetz, the “Subway Vigilante” who shot four Black teenagers in 1984 on a Manhattan 2-train, insisted that his victims had tried to rob him. Penny’s defenders don’t bother with such claims, opting instead to grant him the power of the psychic pre-cogs in Minority Report, entitled to mete out punishment for imagined crimes that have yet to be committed. This tweet from journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon is indicative of such a mindset:
Setting aside the laughable faux-populism of a deputy editor at Newsweek claiming to speak on behalf of “working class New Yorkers” and the reality that we do, in fact, know quite a lot about what happened to Neely (the medical examiner has ruled his death a homicide), the violence Ungar-Sargon is lamenting here is not the violence against the man who was choked to death. It’s the violence she imagines that man could commit. Butler again:
What struck me on the morning after the verdict was delivered were reports which reiterated the phantasmic production of “intention,” the intention inscribed in and read off Rodney King’s frozen body on the street, his intention to do harm, to endanger. The video was used as “evidence” to support the claim that the frozen black male body on the ground receiving blows was himself producing those blows, about to produce them, was himself the imminent threat of a blow and, therefore, was himself responsible for the blows he received.
I don’t know if adjunct professors qualify as “working class New Yorkers” in Ungar-Sargon’s schema, but I’ve absolutely had uncomfortable experiences on the subway—aggressive panhandlers, people visibly high on drugs, seemingly volatile people in the midst of mental health crises. Most of the time, I just keep my earbuds in and my eyes on my phone. On rare occasions, I’ve switched cars to extract myself from the situation. Though they’re much less frequent than Fox News or Eric Adams makes them out to be, these things happen on the subway, as do, even more infrequently, physical altercations. (Penny couldn’t have been aware of it at the time of the incident, but Neely had himself instigated such altercations in the past.) I don’t move through the city anxious that a troubled person is going to punch me in the face, but I’d obviously prefer that random punching didn’t happen at all.
The answer, though, can’t be to deputize every dude with a hero complex as judge, jury, and executioner. As Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse tweeted about the conservative lionization of Penny, “‘You can kill anyone making a scene in a public space if you’re personally uncomfortable’ is a hell of a stance from the same people who’ve been throwing tantrums in Target over its masking policies for the last three years.” Guys who open carry their semiautomatic into Publix while decked out in body armor make me uncomfortable. So do homophobes who baselessly accuse gay teachers of being “pedophiles” or “groomers,” and bigoted thugs who show up at a library’s Drag Queen Story Hour screaming slurs in the name of “protecting children.” But I wouldn’t advocate putting any of the above assholes in a fatal 15-minute chokehold. Obviously, though, they’re not who Penny’s most fervent defenders are imagining when they envision hypothetical violence. They’re imagining someone who looks like Jordan Neely.
Odds & Ends
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Unfortunately, the essay doesn’t appear to be available online, but you can find it in the 1993 collection Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by by Robert Gooding-Williams.