A courageous man, along with his fellow passengers, restrained a mentally disturbed vagrant who was allegedly threatening to kill commuters on a New York City subway. A few weeks later, in the same town, a pregnant hospital worker checked out a Citi Bike to get home from her 12-hour shift and was surrounded by a group of men who falsely accused her of stealing the bike from them, physically harassed her, and then smeared her name on social media.
There is a concerted effort from powerful people in the media, on the internet, and in district attorney’s offices, to paint both incidents, not as a conflict between law-abiding citizens and their aggressors, but as representative of a racial struggle that they accuse everyone in the country of being a part of.
But these two events are not stories about their participants’ race. A thoughtful person who hears the details of each case could see that, from the facts we know, each was a struggle between the helpless and the lawless; in one case, there was someone to intervene on the innocents’ behalf, and in the other, there was none.
The average law-abiding, middle-class man, of any color, who fairly observes the Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely scuffle would see himself reflected more in the subway rider who was threatened by a drug-addled vagrant’s actions than in the vagrant. If he’s spent any time in a metropolitan area, he’s probably been in similar shoes as Penny’s fellow passengers on the train. (For
