Renee Good should be alive today. Her wife and son were robbed of a lifetime with the person who loved them most. Forensic video analysis from the New York Times and the Washington Post confirm that Renee was not ramming the ICE agent who murdered her in Minneapolis and was in fact leaving the scene and moving her vehicle as she was seemingly instructed. She was a poet and her six year-old son had already lost his father a few years ago.
Keith Porter should be alive today. Keith was murdered by an off-duty ICE agent at his Northridge apartment, where both men lived. ICE claims that Porter was firing a gun in the air, but given this administration’s wanton track record of openly lying, it strains credulity to believe their version of events. Even if Porter was firing a gun in the air, a federal immigration officer should not be self-deputizing and summarily executing people in the streets. A co-worker of Porter’s said on Instagram “He is one of the most popular people in this store. He’s already a legend around here from just being him … This is beyond heartbreaking.”
The 32 people who died in ICE custody last year should be alive today. 75% of the people detained by the Trump deportation machine had no criminal record. You can read the names and stories of the people who died in the Guardian article linked above. They are people who fled violent, unstable conditions and died preventable deaths in barbaric conditions. They have been killed because we are ruled by an administration riddled with psychopathic gutter Nazis attempting to make the United States a permanent white ethnostate.
Almost everyone with their hands of the levers of power over the last five years has failed to prevent these deaths. Your fave has blood on their hands just like Trump does. Anyone not calling for the abolition of ICE at this moment is not your ally. The Democratic establishment has spent this century kowtowing to the conservative nativist propaganda machine that manufactures panic about immigrants to distract from the growing inequality eating away at every corner of our society. The ugly truth that both parties are complicit in is that this country very much depends on hyper-exploitable cheap migrant labor to function. Immigrants pick our crops and work in our Amazon warehouses, they clean our offices and kill our livestock for us. Being able to extract cheap labor and resources from the Global South is an essential component for keeping the American empire humming.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” All of these deaths I’ve listed are premature deaths in the name of maintaining and expanding our white supremacist hierarchy we exist under. The deaths of immigrants, the deaths of bystanders, are a result of maintaining this machine of exploitation. We mourn these people, we disdain their murders, because the state should not be engaged in this kind of slaughter on a regular basis. An egalitarian and just multiracial democracy cannot tolerate this level of constant state violence. You cannot claim to be a free society and simultaneously have the largest prison population on the planet and 1,177 murdered by law enforcement in a single year.
You may want to tell yourself that the violence of ICE is a distinct and unique abomination from the violence of our broader law enforcement apparatus, but I want to remind you that Renee was murdered less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered. If you look into your soul, if you have any amount of intellectual honesty, then you have to admit that these are all an extension of the same inherently violent machine. Deep down, we all knew it was a matter of time until ICE killed someone this way, because we know the police kill someone every day in this country.
Another ugly truth of this moment is that it feels distinct because Renee was a white mother, it seems as though the illusion that white women are somehow shielded from this violence has been shattered. The sentiment of “it could have been you” has bounced around social media constantly. Maybe that’s what it takes to get people into the streets, maybe that’s the breaking point where enough will be enough for a mass of people. But that’s a pretty grim reality when so many have already been killed at the hands of ICE and our police.
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In early morning doomscrolling the day after her murder, I found the poem Renee published in 2020 titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”. In it she references “the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—” Renee Good was apparently from Colorado Springs, my hometown. That IHOP is 3 miles from my parents house. It’s an eerie, out of body experience to have someone’s art reach me from beyond the grave, to know I share such proximity to a person whose murder I watched over and over again.
I was reminded of discovering George Floyd’s rapping over DJ Screw beats at 3 AM in 2020. I seized up with tears at the sound of his voice just like I wept reading Renee’s poem. There’s something about being touched by a person’s art, a person who previously only existed as a politicized tragedy, that makes them infinitely more real and human. This is the real power of art, to immortalize people’s souls after they pass. This, at the end of the day, is why conservatives want to stamp out art so badly. Creation can’t be contained, it tells a story about the essence of who a human being was on their own terms. No amount of spin and lies from Kristi Noem can diminish the power of Renee’s poetry, no amount of disparaging the memory of George Floyd can take away the sound of his voice on those recordings.
Renee’s poem ends with this stanza that’s haunting me:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.