Dershowitz On The Jordan Neely Chokehold

Alan Dershowitz has an interesting commentary on the Jordan Neely episode, wherein a mentally unstable homeless man who was behaving bizarrely and apparently threatening New York subway riders was killed after a former Marine, assisted by other passengers, placed him in a chokehold with the intent of holding him for police. The question he asks, "Should ex marine be charged for killing subway screamer?" he answers, somewhat predictably, with, "it depends."

But he makes several other remarks that I think reflect his current wider views on society. At about 7:00, he says

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, if the [ex-Marine] had been black and the homless person had been white, would AOC be saying anything? Of course not! Well, maybe she would be saying something, but not what she said about this case. This is all about race, the fact that the victim in this case was African-American and that the alleged perpetrator is white changes everything. That's why there are demonstrations in the street . . . We have become in this country, I hate to use this term, we are now a systematically, systemically racist country.

We were a systemically racist country in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, until Brown v Board of Education. We were systemically anti-black. We were systemically antisemitic. We were systemically anti-Catholic. We were systemically anti-gay. . . . Then from, say, '54 to the beginning of this centuiry, we became not a systemically racist country, we became a country with pockets of racism, but the systems were not systemically focused on race to the advangtage of minorities. But now in the last 20 years, maybe the last ten years, certainly since the death of Goerge Floyd, we have once again become a systemically racist country, everything is seen through the eyes of race.

I find myself agreeing with Dershowitz about 80% of the time, and he's up front about his opinions, which align with the center-left of the early to mid 1960s. This is the case here. But contra Dershowitz, here were cases equivalent to George Floyd in the 1990s, for instance the 1992 Rodney King riots or the somewhat converse case of OJ Simpson's acquittal for murder in 1995 by a predominantly African-American jury. Los Angeles was never Mayberry, and it's misleading to suggest it, or the rest of the country, ever was.

As well, "gay" is not a racial issue. Morally, it's a matter of conduct, which people of any race can engage in. In addition, communities are entitled to regulate that conduct if, for instance, it takes place in public or if it affects the public's ability to enjoy public facilities like parks or rest rooms. The question of how communities can regulate other aspects of same-sex attraction, like drag shows in schools or drag queen story hours, remains open and legitimate, and it's also separate from the question of transgenderism, to which significant factions of the same-sex attracted object. None of this is strictly speaking racist.

Dershowitz touches breifly on another issue, the fact that so far, protests over the Jordan Neely death have been more limited than those over the George Floyd killing, and this illustrates a point Dershowitz seems to miss: Neely and Floyd were both African-American, but the issue is less clear than that. Both also had lengthy criminal records, and both died in the process of behavior that, if not directly criminal, was nevertheless associated with a petty criminal lifestyle.

In other words, they were members of Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal underclass. The social attitudes that led to widespread protests over the Rodney King and George Floyd episodes were based on a tendency to conflate race with the Lumpenproletariat and to insist that enforcement of laws against petty crime is racist simply because some, though certainly not all, members of the petty criminal underclass are black. It's possible that especially since Neely was said to be acting in a way that threatened other people and the ex-Marine was not a police officer, it's been harder to whip the public into a frenzy over the case, which strikes me as a good sign.

Nor is Dershowitz especially clear on just what sort of racism we're dealing with post-George Floyd: it's specifically anti-white. For instance,

A Denver councilwoman has sparked fierce debate after suggesting that white-owned businesses pay additional tax, which would be given in reparations to the owners of minority-owned businesses.

Candi CdeBaca, a 37-year-old Democratic Socialist, told a business forum in Denver on Thursday that more needed to be done to provide reparations.

This is just another version of the much more ambitious proposal to pay reparations for slavery in California, under the assumption that even if whites in the state never owned slaves, they were nevertheless responsible for widespread discrimination against blacks.

Dershowitz is also insufficiently specific on the recent manifestations of antisemitism and anti-Catholicism: Observant Catholics and Jews both needed to bring suits against a number of government agencies for imposing discriminatory regulations on houses of worship during the COVID panic. The FBI has more recently been accused of conducting infiltration ooperations against conservative Catholics.

My own view is that ongoing political developments give cause for optimism, but these are largely connected with the resurgent MAGA movement, over which Dershowitz is at best ambivalent. Well, there was a lot to like about the center left of the early 1960s, but it's important to recognize that it also did a lot to put us where we are now. I'm not sure if Dershowitz fully recognizes that.