December 16, 2024

Humanity isn't guaranteed

We swim in a sea of eugenics.

There is no bigger indication of this than how we treat those without homes. I live in Los Angeles in California, a state known for its progressivism but equally notable for its deep dehumanization of those it leaves in the street. My homeless neighbors are frequently “cleared” from my area. “Cleared” is a word used to obfuscate the truth. At hours when no one is around to see, cops come and throw away the few belongings people have. They harass people and punish them for not having the money to sleep indoors.

The majority of people left homeless in California are elderly. They are evicted from apartments, pushed from their homes into the street. California’s response to this has been a cavalcade of cruelty, with the state going so far as to push Californians into the desert to die for the crime of having nowhere to rest their heads.

We are all much closer to homelessness than we like to remember.

We allow ourselves to sit idly by while these things happen, or to actively participate by dehumanizing the homeless. I know I have done it myself. “Change?” someone might ask, and I will ignore them in a way I would ignore no one else. I avert my eyes. I pretend they do not exist. I actively try not to see them. In that moment, I let them know: they are no longer human to me, they are not worth acknowledging.

It makes sense, then, for Jordan Neely, on a crowded New York subway car, where so many people were averting their eyes, pretending he wasn’t there, screamed out. It makes sense he said he didn’t have anything to live for, he was at his wit’s end. He needed to be heard.

Instead, he was murdered.

His murderer (who I will not name) killed him for the crime of crying out, for asking for help, for trying to shake people out of their patterns of dehumanization. Jordan Neely screamed, but no one should die for shouting.

Jordan Neely’s murderer choked him for over two minutes. The murderer was informed he was killing Neely, but he waited. He ignored these warnings and murdered Jordan Neely.

It was a crime of eugenics, on several levels. One: the homelessness Jordan Neely was experiencing allowed us to dehumanize him first as a “non-productive” member of society. Second: Jordan Neely was a Black man. We have always treated Black people as sub-human in the United States, and his race was not an afterthought to his murderer.

Thirdly, like the George Floyd trial before it, the murderer of Jordan Neely’s legal team argued it was not the arm on his neck that killed him, but his specific genetic conditions. The murder was an afterthought to the real killer: Neely’s genetic makeup.

If the eugenics of it all was not clear in the extrajudicial killing, it has been extremely clear in the aftermath.

In recent days, Jordan Neely’s murderer has appeared on Fox News. He has been feted by J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect. Like the man who murdered Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber (you know his name, but I won’t say it), Neely’s executioner will likely go on a book tour and create a name for himself in “right wing white man murderer/celebrity” bracket. The fame of the murderer will inspire other white men to launch their own financially advantageous extrajudicial campaigns of terror.

I have dehumanized the homeless. I repeat it again to let you know I am guilty of the same crime I am asking you to acknowledge. In the times ahead, it is those we are most willing to dehumanize who will be terrorized, surveilled, and killed by the state and state-supported actors. It is important to recognize this in yourself, to recognize this in all of us.

We are swimming in a sea of eugenics. We have to remember it surrounds us. If we forget for a moment, we will swallow it, and we will drown. We will forget there was a point when we had other beliefs, when we saw our fellows as human.

Extra reading: “The Invisible Man” by Patrick Fealey, a first-person account of homelessness

Extra viewing: Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, which is all about the ease of collaborating in fascism

PS: I promise to talk about how much I hate Alien: Romulus next week, a less depressing thing.