The killing of Renee Good by a federal agent in Minneapolis last week has broken the hearts of millions of Americans across the country. It’s forced many of us to accept the profoundly dispiriting truth that we’re no longer living in an America that we can recognize as our homeland, as a nation ruled by law and aspiring to achieve equal justice for all.
It’s a terrible thing to have to write such a sentence, but it’s really nothing new. Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Patrick Lyoya have long proved the point. Somehow, though, Good’s murder by a federal immigration officer lays bare the stark reality of official injustice in America.
Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of a six-year-old boy, was shot in the face by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent who reportedly screamed at her while pulling the trigger, “you fucking bitch.” DHS officials have tried to defame the murdered woman by calling her a domestic terrorist and claiming she tried to run over the officer with her car. The officer was part of a heavily armed team of ICE agents prowling through her neighborhood. He was unharmed. She is dead, her life stolen from her. Multiple videos show he was never in danger. Voice recordings let us hear Renee Good speaking to the officer respectfully, even deferentially, before he killed her. I can’t imagine the terror she felt in the last seconds of her life.
In this fatally authoritarian new American culture of ours the odds that such a horror could happen to any one of us have risen dramatically, and for no good reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Chances are we’d be blamed and vilified, too. DHS agents killed at least 9 people last year. Transparency, though, has been so thoroughly effaced, we’re not exactly sure who all the victims are. Or if any or all of them were American citizens.
Their names include Keith Porter, killed by DHS agents in Los Angeles; Silvero Villegas-Gonzales, killed in Illinois; Californian James Alanis Garcia; Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, shot in a Dallas DHS field office; Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez, also shot and killed in Dallas as was Jose Andres Bordones-Molina. We don’t know the identity of the rest of the victims because DHS apparently doesn’t keep records of such shootings that are available to the public.
From what we can piece together from multiple sources, Renee Good was born in Colorado. She was a western American woman who didn’t consider herself an anti-DHS activist. She’d written no belligerent manifestos. She had never been arrested or charged with any crime. She’s described herself variously as a poet and a guitarist, a peaceful “Christian” mom who was recently widowed. She and her neighbors apparently weren’t happy with the idea of masked, heavily armed federal agents rummaging through their neighborhood. Renee herself displayed no hostility. As the officer who would kill her approached her van, she reported smiled at him and said, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Major media so far has done nothing approaching the kind of intense investigative reporting that her murder calls for.
Ms. Good’s wife and partner, Becca Good, released a statement, reported by the Associated Press, saying that Renee was a religious person who “knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” That’s hardly the description of a terrorist. “We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness,” Becca Good said.
Even if Renee Good was an indignant protester, which she wasn’t, she would never have deserved to be shot multiple times in the face by a federal agent and reportedly refused immediate medical attention before she died of her wounds. No one in America deserves to be brutalized unto death by law enforcement officers who are so enraged that they believe they are not only above the law but that common customs and the moral codes of human decency do not apply to them.
Trumpian law enforcement is creating a country none of us are safe in. The public grief that Renee Good’s murder has caused so many of us distress is not only in sympathy for her parents, family and friends, and in recognition of the monstrous loss forced upon them, but also for all of us who are witnessing the lingering death of equal justice under law for everyone in this country, citizen or not. Our suffering is the collective anticipatory grief of finding ourselves entrapped in a lethal, incipient despotic state.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Chad Davis)
I’m sure that, for those with an option, events such as this make on consider the possibility of renouncing one’s citizenship.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece. As I’m sure many of us our doing, I am trying to understand why the Trump phenomenon has happened in our well-founded constitutional government. There seem to be many reasons, and I don’t intend to develop my own list. However, I am trying to understand a few fundamental reasons:
– The strength of tribalism. Tribalism is from the gut. Avoiding it requires thoughtful consideration of its effects. There is a fairly strong we vs they belief system in the US. This is odd given that we are a people made up of immigrants from many backgrounds. Tribalism may be one contributor to that phenomenon.
– “Money is the root of all evil.” Capitalism is an unstable system, because people with money tend to have more ways to exercise power than people without it, so the more money some people have, the more money they will get. Regulation is needed to interrupt that cycle.
– The bulk of society can see the unfairness of the power (including its inheritance) that has been acquired by the wealthy; i.e., inequality.
– In our two party system, the regulatory effect of policies to moderate inequality that was identified by Democrats during the FDR administration has eroded, especially during and after the Reagan administration. The masses see that abandonment and they resent the Dems for it.
– So there is a need to restore the regulation of inequality. Getting rid of fascism would be a big help,
https://www.jezebel.com/bari-weiss-cbs-is-leaking-like-the-titanic
Now that things have changed it is probably not a good idea to insclude the last name of those responding.
Watch and learn. If you do not know history it will repeat it’s self.
The republican party as we know it is gone and has been replaced by a monster.
Watch hunting H i t l e r it was on the History Chanel 2017. but you can see it on YouTube. What Israel did in that war, we might be next.
I have no guns, nor military training so what will a civil war look like?
The only weapon I have is I can vote.