This System Doesn't Want Witnesses

Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of 3, was shot in the face in broad daylight. It happened mere blocks from where George Floyd was murdered, and one day after the anniversary of the January 6 storming of the Capitol. These things are connected.

If Renee’s murder makes you angry—and it should—then my encouragement for you is to be brave and zoom out. This is not a story about an officer who lacked training or a lone gunman who acted rashly. This system did not malfunction yesterday. It acted exactly as intended.

We don’t just see it in the actions of ICE, but in the chorus of people defending the indefensible. One wonders if the right-wing influencers immediately siding with ICE even watched the tape in which Renee’s car is seen backing up, making a three-point turn to move away from the officers. After backing up, she clearly turns the car away to drive off. This is when he shoots her.

As a Marine officer, I received training on deadly force and de-escalation. It was drilled into me that deadly force is never authorized for a fleeing suspect. The principles of proportionality and necessity were also taught: deadly force is only justified when non-deadly alternatives are not sufficient to stop the threat.

Yet as this ICE officer steps easily to the side of her slow-moving soccer-mom SUV, instead of backing away from the vehicle to protect himself (as one would expect if it were being “weaponized”), he leans forward with his firearm and blasts this mother at point-blank range.

I was shocked by how many people viewed the same video as me and immediately gave the benefit of the doubt to this officer.

Could they really believe that “proportionality and necessity” meant the only way to deal with an unarmed, non-combatant mother of a six-year-old child who had shown no violent behavior was to shoot her in the face?

Renee Good was not on the scene to murder an ICE agent with her car.

She wasn’t there because she was being targeted by the agents either. She was there as a legal observer—to film ICE and hold them accountable. It has never been more essential to exercise this right. ICE does not follow due process, and their masks embolden them to act extrajudicially and evade accountability.

This is very personal to me, because I recently attended a training event for ICE observers in my community. I took my son with me to learn about the importance of standing up for our neighbors—especially the most vulnerable ones (a clip from the training below).

After Renee was killed, my son asked me if I was still going to try to be an observer. I told him I wasn’t sure. After all, if we can’t observe them, who will hold them accountable? He said, “Dad, I don’t want you to go.” This is why they shot her: ICE doesn’t want me to go either—this system does not want to be witnessed.

The training I went to was held at a Baptist church. Renee probably went to one just like it. It was put on by Christians who were convinced that loving our neighbors means loving all our neighbors. At the event, we were reminded of our rights:

First Amendment: The right to record law enforcement in public and to inform others about their activities.
Fourth Amendment: The right to refuse a search and deny entry to private areas, including a car, without a warrant; law enforcement may not seize your phone without a warrant.
Fifth Amendment: The right to refuse to answer questions that could incriminate yourself.

I grew up surrounded by white Christian nationalism, and I remember being taught that these rights were very important. “Don’t tread on me” was our libertarian policy. Strangely enough, many of the same people who fly that anti-authoritarian flag were the first to exclaim that Renee “should have listened to law enforcement, and she’d still be alive.”

It turns out that “don’t tread on me” doesn’t apply when it comes to opposing the authoritarian enforcers of the dream of white America.

“Don’t tread on me” was always about not being allowed to tread on whiteness. It did not apply to Renee, just as it did not apply to Trayvon Martin.

In case you don’t remember the details, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was a high-school student who was first stalked and then shot by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed that his life felt threatened. Although Martin was unarmed, Zimmerman’s defense attorney argued that the ground itself was a deadly weapon Martin used against him. They even brought a slab of concrete into the courtroom as an exhibit.

The “stand your ground” law became a national conversation during Zimmerman’s trial, but the theologian Kelly Brown Douglas points out that “stand your ground” is much more than a law—it is a culture. A culture in which moral innocence is granted to whiteness—and especially to police—that Black and brown people are rarely afforded.

It takes a suspension of disbelief to believe an armed man could shoot an unarmed Black teenager because he felt threatened by the ground, just as it takes a suspension of disbelief to believe an ICE officer felt threatened by a supposedly “weaponized car” while stepping toward it and firing three rounds at point-blank range.

Whiteness is the power that decides who gets the presumption of innocence and who deserves to be tread on. This reflex is so ingrained in white Americans that they often don’t even know they’re doing it.

President Obama famously asked, “If Trayvon was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?”

When Black Americans heard Obama’s question, they knew the answer was no. If you’re a white American who believes that the rights of this country are equally extended to all, I hope that the slaughter of Renee Good shatters this illusion.

Now, I am of course aware that Renee Good is white. But she was killed while standing in solidarity with her brown neighbors. Many of my Black and brown friends have pointed out that Renee is not the first person to be killed by ICE. She will surely get more attention, not only because her death was filmed, but because she is white. But her whiteness did not protect her, because in opposing ICE—enforcers of the dream of whiteness—she committed the unpardonable sin.

Mere blocks from where Renee was shot, Derek Chauvin squeezed the life out of George Floyd on camera in broad daylight. Even with the footage of a modern-day lynching, this was not an open-and-shut case for white America. To this day, many who believe in the dream of whiteness believe Chauvin should be pardoned. His murder was valid, because it enforced the dream.

Let this incident confirm at least this: ICE does not exist to protect the populace. They do not hunt criminals; they hunt immigrants. They do not go after people for being violent, but for being different. They police difference with violence—a logic as American as apple pie.

Of course, America is an immigrant nation. The Anglo-Saxons who formed our nation’s ethos were not native to this land, but as immigration continued from non-Anglo cultures, the pro-immigration spirit of America quickly turned to the question of letting in the “right kind of immigrants.”

President Woodrow Wilson warned that “our Saxon habits of government” were threatened by the “corruption of foreign blood.” President Theodore Roosevelt feared “race suicide.” President Calvin Coolidge later argued that “biological laws” required racial quotas to preserve the nation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that ICE is not an aberration in American history. It is enforcing American exceptionalism as many Americans have always understood it: America as a white Christian nation.

Trump’s re-election was won on a wave of racial resentment. The so-called “big, beautiful bill,” which poured $100 billion into expanding ICE into a nationwide masked military force, is the sociological response to shifting demographics in a nation steeped in white power.

As Charlie Kirk, the patron saint of white Christian nationalism, said, “America was at its peak when we… dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever.” He warned his listeners of “the great replacement strategy… a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

This fear—of their country slipping away, becoming less Christian, becoming less white—is what fueled the riot on Capitol Hill. They said the election had been stolen, but of course there was never any proof of that. It was their country they believed was being stolen. From whiteness.

When I see footage from January 6 of white men assaulting the center of our nation’s power, I imagine what would have happened if they were Black men—if the Black Panthers had staged such an assault, I can only imagine the bloodbath.

Our imagination for terrorism rarely extends to white men waving flags with the name of Jesus. We reserve that label for those who threaten whiteness, not for those who kill in its name. Domestic terrorists who kill for the dream of white America? We call those patriots.

Making America Great Again has never meant reducing poverty, increasing literacy, or expanding health care. It has always meant making America more white. ICE exists to enforce this dream. They are the foot soldiers of white supremacy.

That’s why the details of the case do not matter to MAGA. Renee’s crime was not that she weaponized her car—it was that she refused to endorse this dream or recognize the authority of the thugs carrying it out. By showing up to hold ICE accountable and protect her brown neighbors, Renee became a race traitor. This is why they called her a domestic terrorist.

Renee was not a domestic terrorist. She was a mother and a poet who showed up to exercise her legal First Amendment rights in defense of her neighbors. When she was shot, her dog was in her car, and her glove box was filled with stuffed animals.

Now, as we sit with the aftermath of this killing, those of us who want to resist have some reckoning to do. I have to be honest: I’m not sure if I will go be an observer. As a straight white male, perhaps it’s exactly how I should be using my privilege. But then I think about my children, and I remember the face my son made when he found out I was still thinking about going.

I think about how willing they were to shoot Renee in broad daylight.

I want my sons to grow up believing ]that our neighbors are worth showing up for. But I also want them to grow up with a father. And the fact that those desires are in tension tells us everything about the country we’ve become. And for Black and brown people, this has always been clear. It’s the country we have always been.

ICE doesn’t fear violence; they fear witnesses. The man who shot Renee was not afraid for his life—he just refused to be held accountable. And in this country, we will always let thugs like that stand their ground.

Any of us who do still choose to show up to hold ICE accountable must know this: Trump’s America will tread on freedom of speech, tread on justice, tread on truth right before our eyes, and tread on our very lives before it ever lets anyone tread on whiteness.