Gov. David A. Paterson commuted the prison sentence of John H. White who fatally shot an unarmed white teenager in Long Island, NY, after an altercation with his son, sparking a debate about racism and the law. [Photo: New York Times]
The state and vigilante lynchings of Black men and boys in the U.S. are not merely an aberration or a momentary relapse on the nation’s path to racial equality. They are part of the toolbox of violent and psychological warfare tactics used on Black people to maintain the system of racial oppression.
Shortly before midnight on August 9, 2006, a Wednesday, 56-year-old John H. White was awakened by his terrified teenage son, Aaron, who shouted:
“Dad, these guys are coming here to kill me!”
White sprang into action, quickly grabbing a pre-Second World War Beretta pistol and emerging from the garage of his Long Island home to confront what he would later describe as a “lynch mob” of five, white teenagers armed with a baseball bat. Words were exchanged and the most belligerent of the youths, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, Jr.—known as “Dano”— lunged at the pistol; White fatally shot him in the cheek at point blank range.
At trial, White’s attorneys would seize upon the 911 recording as the boys raced Dano to the hospital in their black Mustang Cobra. Wrote Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker:
“The 911 operator can be heard saying, “Sir . . . hello . . . hello . . . sir, pick up the phone.” The boys, their muffled voices almost hysterical, can be heard shouting directions to one another and giving assurances that Dano is still breathing. The operator keeps saying, ‘Hello . . . sir.’ Then the voice of Joseph Serrano, sitting in the back seat with his bleeding friend and his baseball bat, comes through clearly: ‘Fucking niggers! Dano, I’ll get ’em for you, Dano.’
White’s conviction on a single count of manslaughter serves as a stark counterpoint to the acquittal last week of Daniel Penny, a white, Marine veteran who strangled an African American panhandler, Jordan Neely, aboard a New York city subway car. Unlike Cicciaro, Neely was alone, unarmed, and in mental distress; witnesses described him as belligerent and aggressive, but he did not at any point assault or attack anyone.
Cicciaro and his friends were enraged by a message posted in an Internet chat room threatening to rape a female friend; they believed, mistakenly, that Aaron White was the author. Former New York Governor David A. Paterson commuted the elder White’s 20-month prison sentence but in barber shops, beauty salons and online platforms, African Americans juxtaposed his 2009 conviction against Penny’s acquittal and that of other vigilantes—Bernhard Getz who in 1984 shot four Black youths he alleged were trying to rob him, and George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American youth in a Florida subdivision.
"It was foolish of us to think that a Black man would get justice in a system that is designed to keep him oppressed," said Chivona Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York.
There is, in fact, considerable evidence to support Newsome’s claim that Penny’s acquittal is part of a larger institutional effort that not only condones white vigilantes’ violent attacks against African Americans but encourages it as a means of policing Black dispossession.
Consider that at least 33 states have passed Stand Your Ground laws since the height of the subprime real estate market in 2006, by which time economists had been warning of a housing bubble for at least four years. Well before the downturn, it had become abundantly clear that the real estate market was propped up by fraudulent loans—targeting African Americans and Latinos—that far outstripped borrowers’ ability to repay.
Florida was the first of 33 states in the U.S. to extend, rather preposterously, the Castle Doctrine—the legal principle that states that a man’s home is his castle—dating back to a 17th-century British common law exempting a homeowner from assuming a defensive posture against a burglar or intruder. As a result of Florida’s Stand Your Ground legislation authorizing the use of lethal force outside the home, the legal consequence for killing an unarmed African American in the state is less than that for killing a beaver in Maine.
In fact, a 2010 study by Texas A&M University economics professor Mark Hoekstra and research assistant C. Cheng found that Stand Your Ground laws actually increased the homicide rate by an average of 8 percent.
The authors wrote:
“It is clear that the primary impact of these laws, beyond giving potential victims additional scope to protect themselves, is to increase the loss of human life.”
A statistical analysis of 204 Stand Your Ground cases between 2005 and 2013 by a St. Louis University researcher found “disturbing” proof that “there indeed is a quantifiable racial component in the impact of the law in Florida; namely, a suspect is twice as likely to be convicted of a crime if the victim is white, compared to when that victim is not white.” The article compares its findings to a civil rights-era study that similarly found “strict enforcement for crimes when the victim is white and less rigorous enforcement when the victim is non-white.”
In her 2017 book Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair With Lethal Defense, author Caroline Light wrote:
“(A)s the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements are teaching us now, our current insecurities will not be mitigated by endowing more citizens with the right to shoot first and ask questions later. Indeed, eliminating gun restrictions and the duty to retreat has only intensified the violence against our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. It should not surprise us that (Stand Your Ground) laws and more liberal gun-carry laws—in spite of their ostensibly race-neutral framing—continue to place people of color outside of our nation’s protective boundaries. The deliberate misidentification of criminality and vulnerability is embedded in our very ideals of citizenship.”
The correlation between the proliferation of Stand Your Ground legislation and the simultaneous dispossession of Black wealth through fraudulent home loans is clear. By 2019, the median white family owned almost eight times more in net assets than the median Black household, according to Ann F. Thomas, a law professor at New York University.
Stand Your Ground is not the only means of legalizing white settler terrorism, however. In 2021 state legislative sessions following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Republican lawmakers in 34 states introduced 81 bills that toughen penalties on protesters who block roads, more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told the New York Times. These include, incredibly, bills passed by lawmakers in Oklahoma and Iowa immunizing motorists whose vehicles plow into protesters. Other proposals include an Indiana bill to bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office, and a bill in Minnesota to prohibit anyone convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits, or housing assistance.
In this context, it seems clear that the surge in violent attacks by both vigilantes and police is intended to intimidate Blacks to comply with a pyramid scheme in which whites, especially, are allowed to continue to extract wealth from African Americans in the form of gentrification, rents, consumer and municipal debt, discrimination in the job market and a criminal justice system that advantages capital and police officers, attorneys, judges and bail bondsmen.
The escalation is sparked by the emergence of a post-industrial economy, and the precarity that accrues from it. Whites are, both consciously and subconsciously, trying to retain their racial privileges through violence. Their efforts today are virtually indistinguishable from a century ago when the migration of southern Blacks to Northern factories, warehouses and docks sparked white anxiety about competition for jobs, housing and social status.
In addition to racist pogroms such as those that occurred in Red Summer of 1919, Tin Pan Alley songwriters attempted to console anxious whites with lyrics intended to disabuse African Americans of any fanciful notions they may have entertained. Ditties such as “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” were par for the course:
“Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to plant the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing,
That’s why darkies were born.
Though the balance is wrong,
Still your faith must be strong,
Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.”
Nearly a century later, in the spring of 2015, Darren Seals, an African American activist in St. Louis lamented the ineffectiveness of the public response to Michael Brown’s slaying, concluding in a social media post:
BLACK DEATH IS BIG BUSINESS.
Sixteen months later, the 29-year-old Seals was fatally shot and the car he was sitting in set on fire. His murder remains unsolved.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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