By now, most people in America have likely seen the chilling moment an armed, masked ICE officer in Minneapolis shot three times at point-blank range into the body of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, killing her as she was attempting to very slowly move her car away from an ICE operation. The video taken by an onlooker clearly shows that she was turning her car away from the officer, Jonathan Ross, when he shot her.

Immediately following the shooting, chief federal officials, including President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Homeland “Security” Kristi Noem, and FBI Director Kash Patel all released statements labeling Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist,” or a “violent rioter,” or a “professional agitator,” even though Renee’s final words to the ICE officer were “I’m not mad at you.”

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Contrary to the clear evidence from recorded videos and from people on the ground, the Trump administration has argued – before any investigation has been conducted – that she “weaponized” her vehicle to run over an officer, even when most on-site videos do not confirm this.

An independent private autopsy of Good, released January 21, determined that she was shot three times, with the fatal shot going into her skull, through her brain, and exiting on the other side of her head. Other bullets struck her left forearm and right breast.

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Most of us have also probably seen the horrific video of ICE agents tackling ICU nurse Alex Pretti to the ground and shooting him 10 times in the back while he was already pinned. In the aftermath, the Trump administration claimed he was holding a gun and planning to massacre the area. Video evidence shows he was holding a phone. The administration has at least in part walked back its initial comments.

Under Secretary Kristi Noem, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has become the Department of Surveillance or the Department of Gestapo North America. Through ICE, it functions as a data collection and enforcement agency to hunt, surveil, arrest, and deport anyone with brown or black skin or anyone who speaks Spanish, whether they are U.S. citizens or undocumented and whether or not they have committed any criminal offenses.

DHS has significantly lowered the service standards for ICE officers and reduced their training from the traditional 14 weeks to as little as 6 weeks.

The Trump administration has substantially increased ICE funding and expanded its resources, scope, and officer presence throughout the country. The agents have acted in ways that have contradicted Trump’s promise to arrest “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants.

Instead, ICE officers have arrested, detained, and disappeared people whose only crime is looking Hispanic. Many have not committed any offenses; some are U.S. citizens; and some are children. They have been sent to U.S. detention centers, often far from their homes, or have been flown to foreign authoritarian countries (not of their birth) without due process of law.

Due to enormous public and political backlash, the administration has attempted to walk back some of its clearly misleading and outrageously false allegations about the events on January 7. President Trump, being the narcissist that he is, changed from calling Good a “domestic terrorist” to labeling her death “a tragedy” when he learned that her father is a Trump supporter.

And when questioned by reporters at a press conference in Minneapolis on January 22, Vice President Vance admitted that some mistakes had been made during the ICE operations.

Donald Trump’s actions throughout the first year of his second term have generated some of the largest mass protest demonstrations ever recorded in U.S. history.

While the president still retains about a 50 percent approval rating for his actions on the southern border, recent polls show his approval rating has plummeted across all major political issues, particularly his signature issue of immigration enforcement.

A New York Times survey shows 58% of voters disapprove of his handling of immigration, while only 40% approve. On the issue of ICE’s handling of deportations, a poll from the Siena Research Institute found 61% of Americans think ICE tactics have gone too far.

The recent murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti make it clear what people of color have always understood: that any one of us could be next. Whiteness will not save white people as they once might have believed.

Racism hurts us all

Another key national inflection point – also in Minneapolis – occurred on May 25, 2020. Only seven blocks from the scene of Good’s murder, an observer also recorded and released a cell phone video, this time exposing the brutal execution of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by three Minneapolis police officers. One of the officers, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd gasped repeatedly, “I can’t breathe.”

The video provoked public outrage throughout the U.S. and across the world, launching a mass confrontation of our longstanding systems of institutional and societal racism.

We have long seen videos of police brutalizing people of color, though, and specifically Black people: children sprayed with the full force of police water cannons during the 1960s, the terrifying attack by Los Angeles police officers on Rodney King, the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Erick Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in St. Paul, and Stephon Clark in Sacramento, to name only a few.

The realities of systemic racism have had a profound impact on mass movements for social change from the Civil Rights movement to the Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, massive numbers are showing up for the spontaneous and organized “Hands Off,” “No Kings,” and “ICE Out” protest rallies.  

While people of color do not need to be reminded of the impact of racism on their lives, white people have come out in increasingly large numbers to protest in solidarity. Why?

It is possible the senseless murder of Floyd in all its graphic details was the proverbial “straw” that broke white people’s denial of the profound legacy of racism. Possibly it was the incident that exposed the myth, the lie of the “bad apple” theory of one or two bad police officers or departments being the problem. Possibly, watching the brutality toward Floyd layered on top of all the other incidents brought white people to that critical mass of understanding.

Maybe being seated around their television screens for so long during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic exposed them sufficiently to the horrors of racism.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is something more. Maybe they believed that it is in their own self-interest to speak up, to march, to challenge racism on the individual, institutional, and larger societal levels.

And what could be white people’s self-interest?

Well, for one, maybe white people saw in the treatment of Floyd and now with Good and Pretti their own fears of being mistreated by police or ICE. Or possibly many may realize that they lose a piece of their humanity, integrity, and self-worth whenever they fail to intervene.

They may also realize that racism comes between people by destroying friendships and family relationships. It also perennially exposes to the world that the United States still has a very long way to go to ensure the “freedom and liberty” it has promised ever since Thomas Jefferson declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

White people could also be coming to an understanding that racism makes bad economic sense for large corporations and smaller businesses alike by restricting or limiting potential markets and customers.   

Interest convergence

The late Dr. Derrick Bell of New York University Law School forwarded the theory of “interest convergence,” meaning that white people will support racial justice only when they understand and see that there is something in it for them, when there is a “convergence” between the interests of white people and racial justice.

Bell asserted that the Supreme Court ended the longstanding policy of “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education because it presented to the world, and in particular, to the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, a United States that supported civil and human rights.

Let’s take another example: the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) president, Brigham Young, instituted a policy on February 13, 1849, emanating from “divine revelation” and continuing until as recently as 1978 that forbade ordination of Black men of African descent from the ranks of LDS priesthood.

This policy prohibited Black men and women from participating in the temple Endowment and sealings, which the Church requires for the highest degree of salvation. The policy likewise restricted Black people from attending or participating in temple marriages.

Young attributed this restriction to the sin of Cain, Adam and Eve’s eldest son, who killed his brother Abel: “What chance is there for the redemption of the Negro?,” stated Young in 1849 following declaration of his restrictive policy. “The Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood.”

The twelfth LDS Church president, Spencer W. Kimball, who served from 1973 to his death in 1985, was supposedly touched with a vision, and he reversed the ban, referring to it as “the long-promised day.”

Well, we can ask today whether “revelation” or interest conversion was the determining factor in granting Black people full membership rights in the Church at a time of ongoing and heightened civil rights activities in the United States and an increase in LDS missionary recruitment efforts throughout the African continent.

In another example, the issue of slavery became a lightning rod in the 1840s among members of the Baptist General Convention, and in May 1845, 310 delegates from the Southern states convened in Augusta, Georgia, to organize a separate Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) on a pro-slavery plank. They asserted that to be a “good Christian,” one had to support the institution of slavery and could not join the ranks of the abolitionists.

Well, again, whether by divine inspiration or interest convergence stemming from political pressure and shrinking church membership, 150 years later in June 1995, the SBC reversed its position and officially apologized to African Americans for its support and collusion with the institution of slavery (regarding it now as an “original sin”), and also apologizing for its support of “Jim Crow” laws and its rejection of civil rights initiatives of the 1950s and 1960s.

Oppressed & hurt

Frederick Douglass, who escaped enslavement and worked for the cause of liberation for the remainder of his life, said the dehumanizing effects of slavery did not touch the enslaved alone, but also the white slavers, whose role corrupted their humanity.

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of another man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

While the social conditions of Douglass’s time were very different from today, Douglass’s words nonetheless hold meaning.

It cannot be denied that racism has served white people by affording them great advantages and privileges. Eventually, however, systemic racism has backfired, and the chain has taken hold of them, too.

Therefore, within the numerous forms of oppression, members of subordinate (sometimes called “minoritized”) groups are oppressed, while on many levels, members of the dominant groups are hurt. Although the effects of oppression differ qualitatively for specific subordinate and dominant groups, everyone loses in the end.

The meaning is quite clear: When any group of people is targeted for oppression, it is ultimately everyone’s concern. We all, therefore, have a self-interest in actively working to dismantle the many forms of oppression.

I believe we are all born into an environment polluted by racism, which falls upon us like acid rain. For some people, spirits are tarnished to the core, others are marred on the surface, and no one is completely protected.

Therefore, we all have a responsibility, indeed an opportunity, to join together to construct protective shelters from the corrosive effects of racism while working to clean up the racist environment in which we live. Once we take sufficient steps to reduce this pollution, we will all breathe more easily.

No one ever again will have to plead, “I’m not mad at you” before being shot, or beg, “I can’t breathe” at the hands (and knees) of the people supposed to protect us.

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