ALT Jordan Neely was murdered by a white man on a New York City subway train for being Black, living in poverty and the mere act of asking for something to eat. We need to be unequivocal about the fact that being Black and being poor in America are not crimes punishable by vigilante death, and yet we sadly know that this is not our reality. When institutions like the New York Times downplay the public execution of a Black man by framing his death in passive tense and obscuring the lethal impacts of racism, they play an active, outsized role in dehumanizing Black Americans and normalizing the criminalization of Blackness and poverty. When politicians write off a murder caught on tape by saying "there's consequences for behavior," when that "behavior" is being systemically and generationally failed by the state and the "consequences" are extrajudicial death, we should hold those politicians accountable for their dangerous words.