Murder and Privilege

This week a masked ICE agent murdered 37-year-old mother and poet, Renee Good.

There is no doubt that this was murder.

The killing was completely senseless. Minneapolis has no need for ICE-officer presence in the first place. Even if there was a need for ICE, there was no need for the officers to escalate their interactions with Good by screaming and assaulting her. In a typical traffic violation an officer would simply ask, “what seems to be the problem here?” Instead, because of the many lies the Trump administration has told about immigrants and those who seek to protect them, several of the ICE officers were nervy, jittery, and altogether too worked up.

The last words Good spoke to the ICE officer were, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” That phrase, said by Good with a nervous and compliant smile, provoked the officer to unholster his weapon and point it at Good. Good clearly seemed confused by a lack of clear instructions, pointed her car away from these untrained and unprofessional officers and tried to leave. If she had been allowed to leave, her six-year-old son would not now be an orphan.

The officer was in no danger; there was no self-defense. Video analysis clearly shows the officer pointed his gun while she was in reverse and not moving toward him. He fired after he was free from the car’s path. He was never struck by the car. There was no justifiable reason for a single shot, yet the officer fired three times.

This is murder, plain and simple.

Calling this murder doesn’t mean you’re against law enforcement. If anything, it might mean you want to uphold the necessary actions of lawful police work. Calling this murder doesn’t mean you are in favor of illegal immigration, it simply means you believe we’re all children of God. Calling this murder is not heated rhetoric, it is accurate and accuracy is needed if you want accountability in our government.

However, to deny that this was a murder is more than deeply troubling. It is the work of those who want to undermine the pursuit of real justice and limit democracy. It disregards accountability and compassion. It raises questions about the denier’s commitment to ethical law enforcement. To deny that this was a murder is to deny justice.

Isaiah 5:20

Woe to those who call evil good

    and good evil,

who put darkness for light

    and light for darkness,

who put bitter for sweet

    and sweet for bitter!

Yet we shouldn’t be surprised. This is all from the playbook of the privileged who want to maintain their power. People who deny that Good was murdered senselessly and in cold blood by a poorly trained ideologue in a mask are using bad faith argumentation that seeks to derail healthy debate at best and at worst, confuses and avoids our civic duty to pursue truth. I often avoid the term gaslighting because it is mostly used by gaslighters themselves, but it fits in this situation. It’s all about denying obvious truth (it wasn’t murder), minimizing facts (we weren’t there so let’s let the courts decide), twisting the truth (there is a falsely edited video making the rounds in right-wing-media right now that deceptively makes it look like Good’s car hit the agent when it clearly did not), all in the service of making us think we’re the crazy ones.

They shift words by deliberately reframing terms to evade real accountability (e.g., saying, “you are always being political,” when none of us asked to have to respond to this and are only doing so honestly). I see this all the time even in progressive churches where a congregant may say something like, “you’re not being welcoming if you’re not welcoming to my unwelcome.” It’s more than obfuscation, it is deliberate twisting of the meaning of words like welcome, grace and ethics. It’s an attempt to make simple right and wrong seem complex so they can avoid guilt. And make no mistake, they are not doing this as dispassionate observers. They are doing this rhetorical malpractice deliberately and dishonestly because they are motivated to use language selectively to protect their own privilege, bias and conclusions.

Some of the worst examples I’ve seen lately advance crackbrained straw-man arguments. These sound like, “fuck around and find out,” or, “you get what you deserve when you impede an investigation,” or, “she was a domestic terrorist.” She was in no way fucking around, she was parked in a road. The only thing she should have found out was a traffic ticket. If she was impeding an investigation (setting aside the many issues of ICE’s jurisdiction) the officers should ask questions, ask her first politely to move to the side of the road and then maybe even arrest her. None of us should agree that murder is the right solution. Clearly this gentle mother, Christian, singer and poet was not a domestic terrorist. I don’t know what to say if you make that claim other than you need to seek psychiatric evaluation. We don’t need a robust DHS, we need a department of cognitive reasoning.

Why have I tied all of this to privilege? Because fascists use in-groups and out-groups to promote their agenda. They see society in terms of castes and hierarchies. Some citizens are better than others. A white man with a gun and badge is more important to a fascist than a lesbian mom standing up for immigrants. In fact, lesbians represent a threat to the fragile masculinity of fascists who need to cosplay their manliness by stomping around in fatigues, masks and questionable tattoos. Fascists want to play on the victimhood that is present in your privilege. Deep down you know you don’t deserve your wealth and status, so you say things like, “all lives matter,” when you know you are word-shifting and gaslighting when you say it. Fascists always play into your inclination toward law and order and that inclination grows with privilege. The more privileged you are, the more you want to protect it from the imagined “lawless,” others around you. The ins are law-abiding citizens, the outs are lawless terrorists. The ins are straight, white and cisgendered men while the outs cause people of privilege a deserved portion of sexual anxiety. The ins are the red state farmers and the outs are blue state urbanites in need of ICE chaos investigation.

Wake up you comfortable, white, suburban Christians, your time has come. Do not lose your soul to this administration who has centered cruelty and dehumanization into every single policy. I know you don’t want innocent blood on our streets. You have a critical choice to make, is it going to be for love or for privilege? Will you protect the image of God in all people or will you defend murder? Jesus was very clear that empire loses and love wins. Jesus was very clear that the only law was love. Jesus was very clear that our neighbor whom we should love is exactly the stranger we want to ostracize.

We’re out of time. I wish we weren’t, but we must take to the streets. We must believe that our morality means something and it’s worth standing up for it. It’s time for the Full Bonhoeffer. It’s time to either pick up your cross or leave the faith, but please stop pretending compassion and justice for all means you need to protect your own privilege.

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Ed. Note: This one is espresso, not cold brew. Obviously this topic was not on my editorial calendar. I felt compelled to sprint out my thoughts today, which means they may not be as becoming, polite or even grammatically correct as other essays where I allow my words to percolate for weeks at a time. There is a chance I have written more eloquently in the past, though I am open to all arguments on the poignancy of my previous prose. Nevertheless, some earlier and related essays you might enjoy or hate depending on your reaction to this one:

Just Do It

The Full Bonhoeffer

The Time For Christians to Fight Fascism is Right Now

Do You Have an Escapist Faith?