Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a [white] mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption.
S.M. concludes
The Republican base is as racist as you imagine. But the racism of the right is part of a larger belief system in which people with certain attributes -- white, right-wing, heterosexual, Christian, anti-feminist, pro-gun, and pro-fossil fuel -- are seen as better than everyone else in the world and deserving of a homeland in which no other people exist, or at least none have power, including mere voting power.
I don't think many of the anti-ICE protesters expected to be immune to ICE violence -- less susceptible, clearly, but certainly vulnerable. These people hate everyone who disagrees with them to at least some extent. Their core hatred might be racial, but they have plenty of rage to go around.
That's largely accurate. However, we knew that much of the GOP base is racist (or racially biased, as I would argue) and there is a core hatred of non-whites.
What we have never acknowledged- and which, to her credit, Goldberg comes close to doing- is that the hostility is usually not primarily grounded in ethnicity. The left is coming close now- with absolutely no help from the center- in acknowledging that most unjust state violence is not perpetrated for reasons of race.
We should have understood this in the summer and autumn of 2020. I tried, with limited success, to explain that there are many evils in this society and that most of them cannot justifiably be attributed to race. Instead, when the George Floyd protests came about, virtually no one (and "virtually" may be inaccurate) in the center or on the left found anything wrong with a movement called "Black Lives Matter."
Somehow, we got it into our collective heads that all - yes, all- of the problem with police violence against the public involved black civilians. There were victims and all were black, perhaps with a few Latinos.
There were three responses to the movement launched by the murder of George Floyd. There were supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, which in those heady days constituted a majority. Most of those opposed to the movement protested that "Blue Lives Matter." And then there were a few people, usually denounced as racists by not only leftists but also by centrists, who maintained "All Lives Matter."
What a bizarre claim! The notion that "all lives matter" was considered bigoted and/or bizarre not only by the left- progressives and liberals alike- but also by centrists. Meanwhile, conservatives countered with the politically wise "Blue Lives Matter." It was hard to argue against that slogan and the left was not chanting "civilian lives matter" nor claiming that police lives don't matter. Strategically, the politically correct "Blue Lives Matter" was the correct, albeit disingenuous, response.
No one I heard or read ever suggested that not only was the slogan "black lives matter" exclusive of whites, but also of Latinos and Asian-Americans. Yet, while there was disproportionate (unjustified) police violence directed against blacks, there were other individuals who were victims of bad policing. I'm sure Daniel Shaver would agree, were he still alive to be asked about it. In December, 2017 The New York Times reported
Newly released body camera footage shows a police officer shooting an unarmed man in an Arizona hotel after the man sobbed and pleaded with officers not to shoot him.
On Jan. 18, 2016, six officers were called to a La Quinta
Inn and Suites in Mesa, Ariz., after guests reported seeing a man with a gun in
the window of a fifth-floor room. The video showed Mr. Shaver and a woman
walking into a hallway as Philip Brailsford, a two-year veteran of the Mesa
Police Department who was wearing the body camera, trained an AR-15 rifle on
them.
Another officer can be heard ordering them to get on the floor and threatening to shoot if they do not comply.
“If you make a mistake, another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you’re both going to get shot,” the officer says in the video. He shouts at Mr. Shaver, “If you move, we are going to consider that a threat, and we are going to deal with it, and you may not survive it.”
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Shaver says at one point. “Please do not shoot me,” he says at another.
The officer’s commands at times seemed contradictory.
“Do not put your hands down for any reason,” he tells Mr. Shaver. “Your hands go back in the small of your back or down, we are going to shoot you, do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” a tearful Mr. Shaver responds.
But immediately after, the officer commands, “Crawl towards me,” prompting Mr. Shaver to lower his hands to the floor and begin moving toward the camera.
A police report by an officer who reviewed the footage
offered two possible explanations for why Mr. Shaver had bent his arm, the
movement before the gunfire. It was “a very similar motion to someone drawing a
pistol from their waist band,” the officer wrote, according to The Atlantic —
but it “was also consistent with attempting to pull his shorts up as they were
falling off.” No weapon was found on Mr. Shaver.
The Police Department fired Officer Brailsford two months after the shooting.
If you haven't already guessed, Shaver was white; if you didn't hear about this killing at the time, you weren't alone. It didn't fit the narrative of the left, the center, or the right (for the last group, because police can do no wrong). Interestingly
The jury deliberated for less than six hours before
acquitting him. The acquittal came the same day that a judge in South Carolina
sentenced Michael T. Slager, a white police officer, to 20 years in prison for
the 2015 shooting of an unarmed black motorist, Walter L. Scott.
Perhaps now, with the killing of Renee Gold, we will begin to understand that most law enforcement officers are fair and just and some, (being human) are not, as with persons in every profession. Of course, there is a danger of over-reaction, inaccurately concluding that state and local police officers are anything like Donald Trump's ICE, which is increasingly acting with impunity.
The upside of the killing of Good- as Goldberg notes- tests the assumption that whites are immune from our "inviolable liberties" being nullified by the Trump Administration and/or its lackeys. But Goldberg and S.M. need to understand that some of us, even back in 2020, knew that the heavy fist of law enforcement authorities was not confined to blacks. All of us- and our freedoms- matter, or at least should.
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