The killing of a homeless street performer on the New York City subway this week is further proof to Roxane Gay of a disturbing new truth in America: "Increasingly, it is not safe to be in public, to be human, to be fallible," she writes in a New York Times essay. In Gay's view, the case of subway victim Jordan Neely joins the growing list of other examples in the news of late: the teen shot for ringing a wrong doorbell, a 20-year-old woman killed for being in the wrong driveway, a fatal dispute over a leaf blower ... and on and on. In Neely's case, yes, he was making people uncomfortable on the subway, but he didn't harm anyone physically, and he certainly didn't deserve to be placed in a chokehold for several minutes, writes Gay. And yet, this is the world we now live in.
"There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions," writes Gay. "There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us." She wonders what is making men so scared that they feel they must kill first before asking questions. And she laments that the list of grievances for which we might be killed by self-deputized vigilantes seems to be growing by the day. In America, we are becoming "a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own." Read the full essay. (Read more about the Neely case.)
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