Internal Exiles

On the murder of Jordan Neely

May 07, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Back in January, I wrote about whether American cities are “criminalizing” homelessness. What they’re actually doing, I argued, is putting unhoused people “outside the the pale of the law,” to paraphrase Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt uses that phrase to describe stateless people in interwar Europe; I thought the social status of unhoused people might best be described as a kind of internal statelessness.

Here again is the relevant passage from Origins, with my emphasis added:

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human inequality, even if it is as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals.

After the murder of Jordan Neely, I’m tempted to go a bit further. Neely was choked to death in a public space, on video and in full view of several witnesses. The police took his assailant into custody, but soon released him without charges. And an astonishing number of people have publicly declared that Neely’s killer did nothing wrong.

If it is permissible for any random citizen to publicly execute you, then you are something even less than a criminal, and maybe even less than a stateless person. Maybe the closest analogue is to someone like the Ancient Roman homo sacer, a condemned man who other Romans could legally butcher at will.

And they do. The United States kills unhoused people all the time; in multiple major cities, murders of unhoused people are climbing. And that’s to say nothing of the rampant violence that stops short of murder: assaults, rapes, hit and runs. Neely’s death was an aberration only insofar as so many people found out about it.

Homelessness, particularly chronic homelessness, robs people of so much. The violation goes much deeper than just material deprivation: by forcing people to live their whole lives in public, it removes them from the democratic community. That’s because, as Arendt has explained elsewhere, privacy—a place of one’s own outside the public realm—is an essential condition of participation in a democracy.

Here is Arendt again, this time in The Human Condition, on the role of the private realm in democratic Athens:

Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and another. … Without [the law] a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the [private realm] sheltered and protected the biological life processes of the family.

It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is more much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the homelessness crisis is a crisis of democracy. That’s partly because mass homelessness has underscored the profound sclerosis and dysfunction of American urban governance. But mass homelessness is also a crisis of democracy because it erodes the very foundation of democratic personhood.

While people like Jordan Neely suffer the most immediate consequences, the logic of that erosion—as Arendt well understood—eventually destroys everything else it touches. If an entire class of people can be exiled from democratic society, then everyone is at risk.