As it so often does, it falls on John McWhorter to try to inject a little reality into the realm of outraged shrieking surrounding the Daniel Penny trial. To be fair, I think most New Yorkers probably agreed with the verdict but there is definitely a noisy fringe that has been trying to turn Jordan Neely into the next BLM poster child. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The same is true for BLM activsts. They only have one less through which to see the world and in this case it's the wrong one.
Chivona Newsome, a founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York and a recent congressional candidate, said, “They will not find a white man guilty of killing a Black man in modern-day America.” Her brother and fellow founder, Hawk Newsome, declared that “the K.K.K., the Klansmen, the evil in America, got another victory,” and after the verdict made a call to “Black vigilantes.” Supporters of Black Lives Matter and the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network were at the courthouse for Penny’s trial every day, chanting, among other things, “If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace.” The NAACP declared that “the acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely has effectively given license to vigilante justice to be waged on the Black community without consequence.” Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African-American Policy Forum and a prominent speaker on antiracism, called Penny a “racist, classist, ableist murderer.”
Of course the claim that Penny acted out of racial animus isn't backed up by anything whatsoever. There doesn't appear to be anything in his life story that would suggest that and on the day he wrestled with Neely he was protecting a car full of terrified people, many of whom were black. There was also at least one black person helping him control Neely.
As for the trial and the claim that Penny was acquitted because he was white, there's no evidence for that either. Really it's a stretch to claim juries in New York City, a very liberal place, are dominated by white supremacy. Would Penny have been convicted if he were black? Again, this is not To Kill a Mockingbird. Juries in New York see black defendants all the time and they don't all get convicted. If a black marine had done what Penny did, it probably wouldn't have become a national news story in the first place.
The undeniable truth about BLM is that they never let the facts get in the way of a good story. But as McWhorter points out (and I'm sure he'll receive a lot of outraged messages for saying it) things have changed in America.
...reality is more complex than just “America hates Black people.”
For a long time, that was clearly true. Even 40 years ago, the evidence was still there. But it’s easier to pretend change never happens than to recognize that it unfolds slowly. The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that about one in four recently married Black American men had a spouse from another race or ethnicity, as did more than one in 10 recently married Black women. The same report said that in 1990, 63 percent of non-Black Americans said they would be opposed to a close relative marrying a Black person; that figure has since dropped to only 14 percent...
America does not hate Black people.
That doesn't mean there's no racism or that everything is always fair. But the idea that the majority of white people in this country are part of a Klan-style plot to murder black people with impunity is just nutty. Are there still some genuine racists out there? Definitely. I could name a few on X who are spouting their garbage right now. But just like the BLM folks shouting outside the courthouse during the Penny trial, they are a fringe at this point. The bulk of the people in the middle are decent people willing to judge others, whether they are black, white or other, as individuals rather than as undifferentiated members of a race.
Kudos to John McWhorter for stating the obvious because, unfortunately, it still needs to be said.
