Just hours after federal agents shot and killed an unarmed Minneapolis woman in her car last week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson posted a video on his Instagram account. Rather than rage at a seemingly unjust killing, the mayor offered a nugget of wisdom for cruel and heartless times.
While the video of a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent firing point-blank at Renee Nicole Good may trigger anger, “Do not let them change the part of your soul that sees a fellow human being when you look at your neighbor,” the mayor said. “We will get through this.”
As Black Americans, who have borne witness to far too many killings like Good’s, a white woman who was monitoring ICE activities in Minneapolis, we know he’s not wrong. Many of us are heartbroken by what happened. Seeing the horrific video — the officer opens fire as Good attempts to drive away, then almost casually holsters his weapon and strolls from the scene — we might even be traumatized.
But we aren’t surprised. We’ve seen this playbook for centuries, and we know this is exactly how the forces of white supremacy operate.
Indeed, some folks are saying to themselves that if this can happen to a white woman, none of us is safe. Exactly. Safety for anyone in a system steeped in anti-Black racism and use of deadly force is, and always has been a mirage.
And it might be that the folks who are most shocked really want to know not what has America become but when did America start behaving like this to white people?
History tells us that white people have long paid the price for defending Black and Brown people.
The government executed John Brown in 1859 for attempting to incite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. In Alabama, a Ku Klux Klansman murdered Viola Gregg Liuzzo in 1965 for shuttling Black civil rights activists between Selma and Montgomery. And a decade hasn’t passed since a white supremacist drove over Heather Danielle Heyer, 32, in Charlottesville as she demonstrated against the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
The lesson feeds into a larger narrative that entrenches white supremacy: stay on the sidelines, and you’ll stay alive. Fight for justice and you might end up dead. Or as Republican U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas put it on Wednesday, “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.”
Black folks know this intimately; the soil of this nation is soaked with our blood. From Jim Crow lynchings to stop-and-frisk police stops, we know racism and state-sponsored violence isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Those arguing that Good should have complied with ICE officers on that icy Minneapolis street or shouldn’t have been there at all, are parroting a script familiar to Black folks. We heard it after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and George Floyd. The dead must have done something to deserve what happened to them.
It’s traumatizing to watch footage of Good’s killing. Humans aren’t soulless, emotionless automatons who shrug when we see life snuffed out. Yet we must bear witness to the truth. That video helps combat the Trump administration’s highly questionable narrative of events.
For Black Americans, though, this visibility has come at a cost. Black folks have lived with more than a decade of extrajudicial, extralegal Black killings going viral on social media. In 2013, the now-defunct website Gawker published a photo of Trayvon Martin moments after George Zimmerman shot him, lying motionless on a patch of grass in a Florida suburb.
Video footage of the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he frolicked on a Cleveland playground — still available on YouTube — will stay with many of us forever.
George Floyd was murdered by a knee on the neck from a cop not even a mile from where ICE gunned down Good.
We must speak up and demand justice. But building community and connection is part of the solution, too.
Centering love may sound like naive optimism, but it’s not. It’s moral clarity. It rejects the slow poison of white supremacy and the insistence that cruelty must be met with numbness — and accepted as inevitable.
In that sense, Mayor Johnson’s words are more warning than comfort: “Do not let them change the part of your soul that sees a fellow human being when you look at your neighbor. We will get through this.”
Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier is the managing director of Word In Black.