Since the well-documented murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, there’s been a lot of name-calling. Ross soullessly punctuated the shooting death of Good with “fucking bitch.” JD Vance classically blamed the victim, calling Good’s murder “a tragedy of her own making” as well as “a tragedy of the far left.” None of this should be very surprising, given that we know this administration’s PR strategy relies on verbal abuse.
There’s also the familiar refusal of accountability and disinformation in Vance’s statements— the holy war against the wokes undertones. But keep listening, if you can bear it. Because this is the language of American fascism. Trump defended Vance at a recent press conference, calling a bystander at the scene of the murder “so loud and so crazy” and a “professional troublemaker” and “just not normal,” effectively conflating Good with “a woman” on the scene, while pathologizing that woman, and implying the justification for Good’s killing exists therein. Elsewhere, he called Good, who he referred to as “the woman driving the car,” as “very disorderly.”
In addition to the gobbledygook distraction tactics, there’s a distinct misogyny here. These women were mad, insane, raving, he says. This administration implies, without ever having to say it outright, that some women must be shot to keep the peace. We need the state to protect us from them. Sure, there’s a half-assed attempt to characterize Good as some sort of organized radical (as there has been in the move to investigate her wife), though I doubt that, to Trump’s base, it matters if any of that is true. The more sinister and subtle messaging in such statements is this: women, especially queer women, are inherently ornery, loud, crazy, wild, threatening, frightening, disorderly. They don’t know what’s good for them.
This language traffics in a long, institutionalized American history of silencing women who challenge male authority, whether by muzzling or drowning them until they shut up. This kind of public punishment does something more powerful than tell the truth: it makes Good into a symbol, something that is not real, and therefore, never really alive.
We also see conservative media trafficking in silencing and negation, by pointing out Good’s pronouns, the fact that she had a wife, as though these details tell us something about why her life should not matter. I fear those that understand this murder for what it is are doing this, too, qualifying her life with her biography, pointing out that she was a mother or a poet. No one deserves to be killed by the state.
America has a long history of negation and erasure— with limiting what can be said in books and history classes, in established historical narratives, but also with limiting who counts as a real citizen, and under what circumstances. In response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good, some have recalled Judith Butler’s pivotal writing on mourning and dehumanization. In Precarious Life, Butler writes: “If violence is done to those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” In other words, if they can convince us she was not real, not fully human because she was a woman or queer or leftist, then no violence has actually occurred.
I’m going to give you a key paragraph from Precarious Life in its entirety, because it’s one I have thought about every year since I first read it over a decade ago:
It is not simply, then, that there is a “discourse” of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
In other words, it’s not just that certain victims or silenced or erased, but that discourse itself creates a vanishing history, which allows the violence to continue. To this vanishing global history we have to add the over 70,000 Palestinians that have been killed since October 2023, at least 20,000 of whom were children.
What has been remarkable about the response to Good’s murder is the level of refusal, the insistence on a national scale that Good was real, not to be forgotten, not to be derealized by this administration. Citing Good’s goodness helps us fight the administration efforts. But this is not America’s first brush with executing people in the street, and this was not even the first time that a woman was shot by the state and called a bitch. Marimar Martinez was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in Chicago just months ago, after he remarked, “Do something, bitch.” As if to say, you cannot act, your are not real, nor are you protected, like me. Exum later bragged about the shooting in a group chat with other agents. Fortunately, Martinez survived.
I’ve been reading a lot about early American life over the past year, while watching our present history unfold. I have thought a lot about phrases you see in history books all the time, like “they were products of their time,” that little line used to dismiss the violence of white men, and any questions. I’m constantly struck by how much we have willfully forgotten with such causal dismissals, such as about what those times looked like, and how surprised we remain when people are beaten or lynched or shot in our streets, as though this has not been American life since its founding. Good was killed just blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin.
We should always be surprised, shocked, totally undone by these profound and brutal losses. We have to see them as part of a larger history, too. As the news of Good’s murder was coming in, I was finishing Percival Everett The Trees, a truly haunting and devastating and beautiful and funny clapback to American “history.” The book is about erasure and dehumanization, names and lives and deaths and bodies forgotten. In one chapter, Everett lists the names of people who have been lynched in America. One by one, a key character writes every name out by hand, an act of remembrance. (Everett talks about writing this chapter here, oddly enough with Dua Lipa, but it’s more than worth the quick watch.)
“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees
I tried to find a list of those who have been killed by ICE. We do know that 2025 was ICE’s deadliest year, and that 32 people died in custody (their stories are told in brief at this link). I suspect such a number and even the stories included are misleading, incomplete, but they are more than what often enters broad discourse, and I hope we all read and re-read the list, perhaps write it out, by hand. As Everett says in the interview above, however, and as he emphasizes in the novel, it’s the unknown victims who are the most affecting. They are doubly erased.
Ross’s “fucking bitch” comment makes Good’s murder especially triggering and familiar to many women; I understand this on a physical level. Most women have experienced a similar threat of violence from a man who feels they have stepped out of their place. Sarah Thankam Mathews wrote eloquently recently about our “snuff film political economy”, and why else Good’s death has been so publicly grievable, another term from Butler, despite the administration’s continued efforts to erase Good:
I mourn Renée Nicole Good, fully and unreservedly. It is only honor to her memory and her values—and the act of protest that she was murdered for—to state that she is not the only person who has been killed or wounded by ICE recently, or who has died in ICE custody in the last year.
One thing seems very clear to me that distinguishes the public response to Good’s slaying from many of these other incidents: multiple videos exist of her last moments, and those videos circulated widely. Combined with the fact that she was blonde, sweet-faced, a mother, and a U.S. citizen, her death arrived already encoded as sympathetic. Already positioned, I would say, as grievable.
I too have struggled in recent years with how we circulate and witness online images of profound violence and suffering. With how some say, watch this and if you don’t you do not care. Meanwhile, the truth remains that if we are human, it is impossible to process the magnitude of past and present state violence, especially on tiny screens day in and day out, in between washing the dishes and responding to emails and picking children up from school and doing late capitalism, especially without breaking down. I understand that some will argue that’s the point, and I don’t disagree. But the effect of witnessing so much violence can also be to deaden us, especially if we care.
Still, I agree with Mathews that “something still can happen when we watch somebody die, if our attention is procedurally slowed enough to take in the theft of another human’s life, if we claim them as human and grievable, and if we still believe in our ability to act.” This leaves a lot up to the viewer, to their already established sense of what is real, their moral convictions, their political openness, their desire and capacity to act, their whole mental state. But for those who are moved to grief, or anger, by this or any recent galvanizing moment, the question is always what we do next. As Sontag wrote, pictures of suffering, after all, do not communicate why suffering is wrong, or how to stop it.
Put much more simply, I have been thinking this week about how not to get sucked into the performative and short-lived outrage, while maintaining said outrage, and showing up. The struggle of our times, perhaps—or America always.
I went to the local food bank with my two kids over the weekend and got offline. We sorted donated produce for distribution. We pulled overripe oranges out of huge palettes, put 6-7 into each bag as instructed, while the kids made 6-7 jokes and pushed their fingers into the moldy, soft holes of the oranges that had already turned, which they jump-shot into trash cans. We took a break, munched on chips and sipped hot chocolate. Then reminded ourselves why we planned to stay for two hours, training our attention on the tasks ahead. We weighed potatoes and onions, three lbs. each, dropped them into red plastic netted bags, tied them off. Danced as we worked to the music playing in the cold warehouse, alongside strangers. The kids enjoyed weighing the vegetables on the metal scales, then lobbing bags over the side of the big crate where all the finished bags went.
We talked, too, as we worked, about the families we did not know who would eat from the bags we packed. How we wanted them to feel the work was done with love. Faceless, nameless people. And I thought about how valuable it is to cultivate that sense of care for those we do not know, and will never meet, much less know fully.
Links:
Women are showing up in MN— support them.
I’ve been slow coming back from the holiday, not only because everything is so bad, but because I’m finishing a big edit on my manuscript. By slow I mean, I’m still spending hours writing thoughtful essays for you every week (!), but this platform has trained us all to think in terms of unsustainable and near-constant outputs, so if I’m sending you less than two emails a week, I somehow think I’m failing and fear your generous support (and the income I rely on!) will evaporate. All to say, Monday posts and community chats will return soon— next week or the end of January at the latest! Thank you for understanding while I make this book good for us and try to be a little less online for a couple weeks.
Please take all the time you need on the book, Amanda.
I don’t support your writing because I feel like I’m buying 2 newsletters/week.
I support it because I believe in your work and reading it makes me more thoughtful, more engaged. I’m so happy you exist and are sharing your thoughts in the world. It’s an honor to be in this community and get to invest in your work. Sincerely, thank you.
Fantastic, Amanda. And the way you bookended this piece with reflections on different types of invisibility and our relations to the unmarkable. Really smart writing as usual.