The thing I need to say first: My heart breaks for Renee Nicole Good. That is a trite expression, but I really mean it, and sometimes there is no better way to express an authentic emotion than via an overused phrase. I would certainly have liked her if I met her; and her poem, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, is original and beautiful, and ends with distressing prescience: "life is merely/to ovum and sperm/and where those two meet and how often and how well/and what dies there".
Someone pointed out in the Times, that Good's killer, Jonathan Ross, could simply have stepped away, let her depart, then used her license plate to find her name and address, obtain a warrant, and arrest her later. According to this op ed piece and other reporting, that was even what his training required. Ross may not have thought about any of that; it is possible he shot Good because he was thinking "don't you fuckin' dare drive away from me"-- in other words, Good disrespected Ross. Which is the explanation the President helpfully gave: "“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
I almost didn't write this essay, because much of the rest of it verges on blaming the victim. But here it is anyway.
I grew up in New York City, and the first time I ever saw the NYPD savagely beat someone for no reason was in 1971, not at an antiwar demonstraton but outside the Fillmore East on its last night. In a restless crowd which had failed to get in to the concert (the Allman Brothers), a cop shouted "They're throwing bottles" (I didn't see any myself) and the NYPD rioted, charging in and beating people. On a street corner, something cruel and absurd happened, Grand Guignol in real life: A cop ordered a motorist to leave, and the young driver said mildly: "But its a red light". The cop leaned into his car, took the keys, and ran away. Almost instantly, another cop said: "Get out of here", and the young man said, truthfully but with the direst consequences, "I don't have the keys". So the cop pulled him out through the car window and beat him til blood was running down his head.
I confirmed that night what I had suspected for the two years I had already been a hippie (shoulder length hair, drugs, anti-war demonstrations): the NYPD was a gang of barely self-contained sociopaths, liable to burst out at any moment. I can't even count the number of times I have seen New York cops beat people since without provocation. During the five years I worked on ambulances, at central booking in the Bronx, I saw a cop take a couple extra shots with her baton at an unruly prisoner already handcuffed and face down on the floor; another cop beat a crazy man who had just kicked me. On the night of the Occupy Wall Street eviction in November 2011, standing still,legally and peacefully, in the middle of a sidewalk outside a circle of police around Zuccotti, I was hit by a riot policeman several times with his shield, hard enough for my glasses to fly away and break. Afterwards, in a holding cell which by the end of the night contained eighty men, every third arrestee was bleeding from the head. One guy with a huge abcess on his forehead was barely maintaining consciousness, and the cops blithely ignored our shouted requests for an ambulance.
In the ensuing years, at Occupy anniversary and May Day demonstrations, acting as a legal observer, I saw the cops beat down one group of demonstrators for wearing multi-colored bandannas (the cops believed that an anarchist organization they called "the Black Bloc" wore black ones), and another, whom they thought were "antifas", merely for trying to cross Houston Street on a green light. Another cop hit me in the chest, not very hard, for trying to speak to someone he had already handcuffed and placed on the ground.
Sometime in between the 1971 experience and the 2011 one, I heard someone say that NYPD was the most violent, dominant street gang in New York City, and I believe that to be true. Continuing to live in white middle class environments (Flatbush, Brooklyn for another few years after 1971, and Amagansett and Astoria in 2011) I was also aware how much denial there was: the official narrative was that the cops were our friends, the "thin blue line" there to protect us; yet at times in those conversations, you could sense an incipient fear as well.
Sometime in those years, I also began learning about white privilege. Before that, I swam in it without knowing it was there, like a fish in water. There were a few different ways I began to study it (topic for another essay), but I found that the best way for a white guy to waive privilege in 1971 was to grow your hair long, and, in 2012 or so, to attend a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Today, as Renee Nicole Good discovered, the best way to abandon privilege is, similarly, to show up at a demonstration for undocumented people of color.
(This is a note added a few days later: I had a Flash of memory, not sure if of something said to me, or which I read in an essay, but approximately: "Dude, you could cut your hair any time. I'm black the rest of my life.")
Which finally gets me to my thesis. I attended large, dangerous demonstrations for four or five years after 2011 in a deliberate assumption of risk. I am fairly certain that Good did not even really know the risk existed.
Trayvon Martin was a teenage boy trying to walk home from the store with snacks, when he was confronted and murdered by a vigilante, George Zimmerman. Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her own bed when cops, serving a warrant at the wrong address, burst in and shot her. They were both African American, and once you start, as a privileged white person, paying attention, you find out how common it is for an unarmed person to be shot dead for standing still, walking, running, driving or even sleeping, while Black. Just as my suspicions about NYPD were confirmed in 1971, my suspicions about American civilization were confirmed when Zimmerman walked free.
Here's where it sounds like I am blaming Good: she ran straight into her own murder. Some people have done that with knowledge of the risk, others suicidally; but I don't think Good had any clue that she might die that night. Yet I would hope that anyone at an anti-ICE demonstration (or any demo being "managed" by armed sociopathic governmental employees) would know that responding to a cop's rageful attention by driving away is like hanging a "shoot me" sign in your window.
Breonna Taylor could neither have foreseen nor avoided her death. Good could have. Aside from the choice of not attending demonstrations, there are ways, as I can attest from my own experience, of using radar, tradecraft, at demos, to avoid or at least minimize the chance of being harmed. To the extent that the planning and carrying out of any demonstration involve a culture in which people like Good are recklessly encouraged or given the opportunity to confront police up close, without education as to and acceptance of the risk, what I understand to be "movement principles" of equality, compassion and treating all humans as ends not means, are violated.
This also will seem uncharitable to Good, but: She was, in addition to being a talented poet and compassionate human, an attractive white woman, and her face is on posters at indignant demonstrations all around the country; she has seized the national (white) attention in a way Breonna Taylor never did.
White privilege, which includes the idea that you are special and therefore government sociopaths won't hurt you, can get you in all kinds of trouble. I saw this in a different form when I defended protesters at Standing Rock. White protestors wanted to go to trial, Native Americans largely did not. The white people (especially the elderly cute ones) thought they would never be sent to prison, or, if they were, they would be treated well (the old practitioners of civil disobedience even have a phrase for doing time, "prison witness"). Indigenous people knew that North Dakota prison guards might walk them to a hallway without cameras, and beat them to death.
President Trump in his first term, boasted about deploying an actual death squad. In 2020, Michael Reinhoel, an antifascist protestor, who brought a gun to Black Lives Matter demonstrations to act as an armed marshal protecting the participants, shot dead a counterprotester at a Portland event, who was carrying a pistol and a baton. A few days later, federal agents fired 37 bullets at and into Reinhoel as he walked out of his apartment. The agents never claimed in their initial reports that he had a gun, and several eyewitnesses said he was unarmed and they just shot him down, as if it were an execution. Donald Trump proudly confirmed this, saying at a rally: "We sent in the U.S. Marshals. It took 15 minutes it was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over. We got him. They knew who he was. They didn't want to arrest him. Fifteen minutes, that ended." And at the debate with Joe Biden: "President Donald Trump commended the U.S. Marshals for shooting Reinoehl, describing it as 'retribution', and claiming to have personally 'sent in' the U.S. Marshals to 'get' Reinoehl".
Of course it seems almost like low-hanging fruit to contrast Kyle Rittenhouse's story: He walked into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha Wisconsin that same month (August 2020) brandishing a weapon, shot three protesters who reacted, and was acquitted by a jury. He was applauded, coddled and rewarded for his murders, instead of being put down like a rabid animal.
"American civilization" is an oxymoron.
My whole life, I have heard it said of people and groups who perished in vastly unequal encounters, that they "brought a knife to a gunfight".
What we are seeing today is unfortunate people like Good, bringing their words to a gunfight.