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By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

You may notice that my Now Reading links this week all have to do with homelessness. I made that choice apropos of the killing of Jordan Neely in a subway car in Manhattan on Monday.

The 30-year-old Neely was homeless, suffering mental distress and — according to video and witnesses — acting in a “hostile and erratic manner” when another passenger, a 24-year-old man, wrapped his arms around Neely’s neck and held him in a chokehold until he was limp. Neely died from compression to his neck as a result of the chokehold, according to the medical examiner. The passenger was questioned and then allowed to leave police custody.

We do know that Neely had been arrested more than 40 times in recent years, including once for assault. We know of the larger backdrop of visible homelessness in New York and other cities, where among other factors high and rising housing costs have pushed many Americans onto the streets. Most of all, we know how the homeless make many of us feel: anxious, uncomfortable and even afraid.

You can sense it in the equivocating reaction to Neely’s death from New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, and New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul. “That was deeply disturbing, and that causes a lot of fear for people, and actually the mayor and I are working so hard to restore that sense of safety,” Hochul said. “The number of crimes on subways is declining and I don’t want people to feel anxious again when something like that comes to light.”

Although Adams was sure to say in a statement that “any loss of life is tragic,” he also added on CNN that “each situation is different” and “we cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do on a situation like that.” In a later statement, Adams was more forthright: “Let’s be clear: Any possible mental health challenges that Jordan may have been experiencing were no reason for his life to be taken.”

As usual, people are arguing over the event on social media. And many of them seem sympathetic to the assailant. I shouldn’t have to be afraid on the subway, goes the argument. Someone had to do something.

I have been a lot thinking about this incident quite a bit since it happened, and I have three points I want to make.

I have no doubt that the people in that subway car felt uncomfortable. I have been in similar situations where I felt similarly uncomfortable. But discomfort is no excuse for violence. Neely, according to witnesses, was screaming and shouting at passengers. It may have been scary. But fear is not a license to use force.

There is nothing Neely did, as far as we know, that gave anyone in that car the right to restrain him. There is nothing he did, in that moment, to deserve death. Yes, he had a record. But no one on the train knew that. And even if they did, there is no individual right to act as judge, jury and executioner for past offenses.

My second point flows from this first one. So much of the discussion of Neely’s death takes the perspective of either the assailant or the passengers. I just did it myself. But let’s think about Jordan Neely, not as an object of fear and discomfort, but as a fully formed human being living in a cruel society that treats homelessness as a crime in its own right.

How many of his 40 arrests were for loitering, trespassing, public urination and any of the other offenses that are, themselves, a product of homelessness in a city that offers few public facilities?

Why is it, in one of the wealthiest places in the history of the world, did Neely lack for a proper place to sleep and adequate mental health care? Why was he thirsty and hungry in a land of unimaginable plenty? Why, in the throes of crisis, was a subway car the only place he had to go?

There should have been something to catch Jordan Neely before he fell this far. Instead, a stranger choked him to death.

We are living through a vicious campaign of demonization and hostility toward the homeless. Networks like Fox News show endless videos of attacks by homeless people that present them as inherently unstable, violent and dangerous. Prominent voices speak of sweeping homeless people from the streets like trash, and cities have tasked the police with using force to solve the problem.

Yes, homeless people have committed acts of violence. But the facts are clear: The homeless, including people with mental illnesses, are far more likely to be victims of violence and abuse than perpetrators. For all the talk of fear and anxiety over being confronted by homeless people, imagine the fear and anxiety of knowing that, to many, you don’t exist as a human at all. And the truth of the matter is that it takes only a bad accident or a job loss or some other traumatic incident for many of us to go from housed to unhoused. We aren’t as distant from homeless people — and homeless people aren’t as distant from us — as we’d like to think.

Which gets to my final point, and the reason I hope you read the stories and reports on homelessness that I have linked to in this week’s newsletter. Our homelessness crisis, just like our crisis of poverty, is a policy choice. It is the foreseeable result of our thin and threadbare safety net and our refusal to turn the wealth of our society into a grant of decent housing, medical care, including psychiatric care, and safety for all.

Our country is built to produce Jordan Neelys and it will continue to do so until we do something about the structure of the society in which we live.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was a look at how Republicans have gotten extremely weird.

DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.

My Friday column was on our 50 years of structural and constitutional stasis and what we might be able to do about it.

For more than 50 years, the United States has been frozen in a kind of structural and constitutional stasis. Despite deep changes in our society — among them major population growth and at least two generational waves — we have made no formal changes to our national charter, nor have we added states or rearranged the federal system or altered the rules of political competition.

I was a guest host on the most recent episode of the Slate Political Gabfest, I discussed the Supreme Court on NPR’s All Things Considered and talked about Tucker Carlson’s text messages on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show.

Now Reading

Albert Burneko on the killing of Jordan Neely for Defector.

Akela Lacy on the demonization of the homeless for The Intercept.

Brian Goldstone on America’s homelessness crisis for The New Republic.

Aaron Gordon on how public transit became a haven for the homeless for Vice.

The National Coalition for the Homeless’s report on violence against the homeless.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition on the Housing First approach to ending homelessness.

Photo of the Week

Old truck. Fake horse. Seen while walking around Arlington, Va., a few months ago. Taken using Cinestill 400d, which is a converted motion picture film stock.

Now Eating: Chicken Teriyaki

My son has a cookbook for kids and this week we used it to plan our meals. The book has a recipe for chicken teriyaki, but it relies on a store-bought sauce. So I looked instead to The New York Times Cooking Section for a more from scratch recipe, not the least because I like to use ingredients I already have rather than buy new ones.

I did not have the pineapple juice the recipe called for, so I used freshly squeezed orange juice as a substitute. You’ll also notice, from the photo I included, that I prepared the chicken like kebabs. Part of that is because it’s a bit easier to grill chicken on a skewer this way, and part of that is just because I like kebabs.

I served this with fresh rice and stir-fried asparagus, and it was a pretty decent hit with the kids.

Ingredients

1 cup soy sauce

1 cup granulated sugar

1 ½ teaspoons brown sugar

6 cloves garlic, crushed in a press

2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

13-inch cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon pineapple juice

8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs

2 tablespoons cornstarch

Directions

In a small saucepan, combine all ingredients except cornstarch and chicken. Bring to boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low and stir until sugar is dissolved, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool. Discard cinnamon stick and mix in ½ cup water.

Place chicken in a heavy-duty sealable plastic bag. Add soy sauce mixture, seal bag, and turn to coat chicken. Refrigerate for at least an hour, ideally overnight.

Remove chicken and set aside. Pour mixture into a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to low. Mix cornstarch with 2 tablespoons water and add to pan. Stir until mixture begins to thicken, and gradually stir in enough water (about ½ cup) until sauce is the consistency of heavy cream. Remove from heat and set aside.

Preheat a broiler or grill. Lightly brush chicken pieces on all sides with sauce, and broil or grill about 3 minutes per side. While chicken is cooking, place sauce over high heat and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a bare simmer, adding water a bit at a time to keep mixture at a pourable consistency. To serve, slice chicken into strips, arrange on plates, and drizzle with sauce.

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