Renée Good knew White Silence is Violence

There’s been a lot of focus on Renée Nicole Maklin Good as a mom. Parenthood is frequently used to construct a narrative of innocent victimhood, often while other complicating elements of a person’s identity are obscured. Good was a mother of three, and her death at the hands of the state will shape the rest of their lives. She was also a queer race traitor, and we’ve heard less about that.

We can’t know the mind of Jonathan Ross but, as Autum Brown said, “Renee Good was not killed despite being white. She was killed because she’s a white woman aligned with the cause of freedom.” I believe her whiteness and queerness stoked Ross’s vitriolic murderous rage. “Fucking bitch” carries a lot of intersecting hateful connotations. Those of us who are queer white women or gender non-conforming people have had those words spit at us by white men. We always know why.

Renée Good broke the rules. As the protest signs have proclaimed, she was “Good Trouble,” rather than a traditional “good girl.” She loved a woman. They had a queer family – mini-van, dog, and all. She stopped that mini-van in the middle of the street. She did that to help interrupt racist, xenophobic state violence. She stopped to help her immigrant Black and brown neighbors. She could have kept driving. All the rules, all the norms, would have had her keep driving. Rule-abiding, complicit white people, civil (law & order) white people, “good” white people… keep driving. We look away.

Not Good. She (and her wife) stopped. It was freezing. Armed federal agents were screaming at her, circling her car. She could have closed her window. Instead, she leaned out, smiled, and with relaxed posture and a calm tone said, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Good refused to be intimidated or provoked by militarized toxic masculinity. Perhaps it was her faith, perhaps she had de-escalation training. Whatever it was, her response was more than many of us could manage. This month many of us are reflecting on the prescience of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Good seems to have taken to heart his lesson that white silence is violence. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Renée Nicole Good was determined not to be that white moderate. She was participating in movements “striding toward freedom.” And now thousands are inspired by her moral courage. White people are getting trained and pouring into the streets in Minneapolis with whistles and cell phones, red cards and groceries. They have, to quote King again, “grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.”

Let’s swell those numbers so we are big in quantity and quality. Let’s form a crowd and stay loud. Let’s confront “the fierce urgency of now.” Let’s be race traitors. Let’s break unjust laws. Let’s make “Good trouble.” Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo!

This piece first appeared on Range Media.

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