On Thursday, just hours after federal agents shot and killed an unarmed Minneapolis woman in her car, 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.
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Indeed, some folks are saying to themselves that if this can happen to a white woman, none of us are safe. Which … exactly. Safety for anyone in a system steeped in anti-Black racism and use of deadly force is, and always has been a mirage.
When civic leaders and elected officials insist the circumstances around Good’s killing “isn’t the America we know,” Black folks hear something else entirely: this is the America we know — the one that justifies killing Black people just because someone suspects they’ve done something wrong. It’s the America that privilege keeps white folks from seeing.
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?
The Price of Standing in the Way
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 Representative 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.”
Racial Violence Isn’t a Bug in the System
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.
But that something usually boils down to one thing: failure to instantly follow the commands of a white man with a gun.
Death Gone Viral
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. It rocketed around the social media website formerly known as Twitter.
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. A police officer with all the training required to obtain a badge shot the boy just seconds after arriving on the scene, looking for an adult with a gun.
George Floyd was murdered by a knee on the neck from a cop not even a mile from where ICE gunned down Good. We might ask ourselves how much the heavy presence of ICE in Minneapolis has to do with the city being ground zero for America’s most recent racial reckoning. It remains to be seen whether Good’s killing will produce another.
Black America Sounded the Alarm
Good was killed in broad daylight, filmed by multiple cameras, by agents of the state. This didn’t have to happen. Black Americans repeatedly warned the rest of the nation what would happen if Donald Trump came back to power. We warned folks that Trump would expand the same architecture of racism and violence he’s always used, from his campaign against the Central Park Five to inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.
And now that the violence has reached people who did not expect it, it does us no good to shout, “WE TOLD Y’ALL THIS WOULD HAPPEN!”
‘My Focus Is on Black People’
How should we respond? By continuing to take care of ourselves, building community, and loving each other.
Mere hours after Good’s killing, author and expert Dr. Joy DeGruy made it clear that Black people are at the heart of her work.
“I am unapologetically Black. My focus is on Black people,” she said during her weekly “Wellness Wednesday” livecast.
But don’t get it twisted: ensuring Black people are healed and loved and whole, she says, does not exclude care for others.
“It’s not the limit of my compassion or my grace or my love or my interest,” she said. “And I believe that the time we’re in right now, we need everybody on board.”
Neutrality, in moments like this, she said, is alignment with power. We must speak up and demand justice. But building community and connection is part of the solution, too. Indeed, DeGruy’s daughter and cohost, Dr. Bahia Cross Overton, often emphasizes the healing power of Black folks “beaming love and light” to each other, and to Black children in particular.
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.”