Remember, Renee Nicole Good was a queer woman.
Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis last week. His wife, Rebecca Good, was present when ICE agents shot and killed her as she stood outside her car. Immediately afterward, protests erupted in Minneapolis targeting ICE and Republican officials in the city, including President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, who claimed the shooting was justified as an act of self-defense.
at a press conference held this ThursdayMr. Vance told reporters that Mr. Good was a “victim of left-wing ideology.” “I believe her death was a tragedy,” Vance said, but acknowledged it was a tragedy of her own making. Many criticized Vance’s statements, especially considering the way he made the accusations. “Left-wing extremism” Charlie Kirk died on Utah’s campus in September, and Vance himself doubled down. blame People celebrating the shooting death of a far-right podcaster.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem suggested Good was a domestic terrorist, and Fox News host Jesse Watters said, “The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado who had pronouns in her bio.”
Another far-right Trump supporter, Laura Loomer, tweeted, “It’s her.” Literally every time,” he replied on what appeared to be Goode’s Instagram account. Loomer and Watters pointed out that her pronouns are part of the reason why she is somehow connected to ICE-related violence.
As these comments from far-right pundits demonstrate, far-right media coverage quickly linked Goode’s queerness to her work to disrupt ICE operations in Minneapolis.
But while far-right news outlets emphasized Good’s queerness, centrist and even left-wing news outlets also featured interviews with Good’s mother and ex-husband, rather than his wife who was present at the shooting, fueling the narrative that she was an “innocent” white mother and denying Good’s own agency in mobilizing on behalf of immigrants in her community.
No one should be shot dead by a government agent, and these news outlets don’t need to be involved in making up an “innocent” white woman for people to be outraged by her death. Indeed, by doing so and denying Goode’s queerness, they deny the ways in which Goode’s identity might have influenced her interactions with the police. Police are not safe for queer and trans people. In fact, Goode’s final words, which escalate the situation, reflect the ways in which homophobia and misogyny appease queer women, and all women, to the sentiments of men.
And even that didn’t work. After shooting her, the ICE agent called her a “slut” in front of Good’s wife, who was dragged away from him as he lay bleeding in his car.
When the media reinforces the narrative that she was an “innocent” mother, it reinforces the same sexism and racism that allows police brutality to continue.
The author of this book said in an interview Beyond purity In a book published in December of this year, Sarah Moslener said, “White femininity has been constructed to require white women to maintain purity within themselves as a way to preserve the purity, the innocence of the nation-state. When the purity movement rekindled in the 1990s, it was a reenactment of this highly racialized 19th-century sexual purity state.”
“That was not something that was available to enslaved women, to other women of color, to immigrant women. This ideal of true femininity became attached to this idea of a strong nation-state. That rhetoric was then used to justify lynchings due to racial terror. When white women are threatened, physically, physically, culturally, they have a right to stand up for things. This was often used as an excuse to justify violence and murder, especially against others. Black men even tied it to the concept of Karen and the right to weaponize white women’s weaknesses,” Moslenor said.
Goode’s shooting of many people was a breaking point for this very reason. Because that was the first time I saw a white person being killed by an ICE agent or a law enforcement officer.
For some, because of the privilege of their skin color, their whiteness was a source of safety, or so they thought until Goode was murdered last week. In the aftermath, they are reconsidering whether this privilege will continue to protect them and what it means in a world where violence against white women’s bodies has long provoked social backlash.
This is no reason to stop fighting — good for you. not the first person Although she is a person killed by ICE and is not even the first person to be killed by ICE in 2026, her whiteness is one of the main reasons that fueled the outrage because of a society that privileges and protects white women’s bodies. Portraying Goode as simply an “innocent” white woman and denying her homosexuality feeds into this performance of anger at the brutality of white women’s bodies.
If the discussion of Goode’s homosexuality, and the persistent homophobia towards gay women, is not factored into our outrage and protests, we will continue to be caught up in the same narrative that means some instances of police brutality, particularly violence against gays, transgender people, and people of color, go completely unreported and unchallenged.
This was state-sanctioned violence, and in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Goode’s death, the Trump administration demanded that people deny the eye and ear evidence, pushing the claim that Ms. Goode had weaponized her car against ICE agents and that the agents had acted in self-defense when they shot her. This is categorically wrong, but denying what we know to be true, what we can witness and understand ourselves, is the final stage of fascism, armed and funded by governments.
But frankly, this is not the first time American police or government agents have killed an unarmed person. Less than six years ago, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in the same city. His death was a breaking point for many who have witnessed police brutality against people of color.
People want to say Goode’s name, but they can’t say or remember her name without remembering or mentioning the names of the hundreds of black and brown men and women, especially disabled people of color, who have been murdered by police. Their names are often spoken and their killings often go unquestioned.
People keep saying Goode’s name primarily because she was a white woman, but the names of black and brown people remain unspoken and unrecognized due to a system that commits inhumanity to violence against white bodies. What Goode’s murder realized was how a system built on the protection of white women, a Christian nationalism that strives for social purity, still victimizes white women who don’t toe the line.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned this week over the Justice Department’s push for an investigation. Good’s Widow. They included career federal prosecutor Joseph Thompson, who objected to the department’s refusal to investigate Mr. Good’s wife or whether the shooting was legal.
In the signs, protests, prayers and petitions you put up and down in the aftermath of Ms. Goode’s murder, do not deny her homosexuality. Don’t deny who she is. Also, don’t deny the work she did. Because by expressing outrage over the murder of an “innocent” white mother, you are reproducing the same system of harm that hurt us all.
Emma Cieslik He is also a museum employee and public historian.
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
