Sometimes, history seems to be commenting on itself. That’s what it felt like when I learned that Renee Good was murdered roughly a mile away from the spot where, five and a half years earlier, Derek Chauvin choked George Floyd to death.
It isn’t just the setting that feels familiar. Beat by beat, all the relevant actors have been following more or less the same script. First, a law enforcement officer kills someone in broad daylight and without provocation. One or more people capture the scene on video with their smartphones. Protestors rally in Minneapolis and other cities across the country; meanwhile, both the Republican Party and the right-wing media apparatus close ranks around the killer. They say he did nothing wrong, and that his victim was a dangerous criminal; they attempt to deny the reality of what anyone with an Internet connection can watch with their own eyes.
There is, of course, one all-important difference between the two cases. George Floyd was a Black man and Renee Good was a white woman.
Floyd’s murder was not, in and of itself, particularly exceptional; in the preceding years, cops had already summarily executed Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and Philando Castile, to name just a few of the most recognizable victims. Some of these other killings had similarly been caught on tape. What made the Floyd case different, other than the scale of the ensuing Black Lives Matter demonstrations, was that his killer was eventually held accountable. Chauvin had little reason to believe he would be punished for his actions, which is probably why he looks so nonchalant kneeling on Floyd’s neck; he could rely for protection on a long racist tradition that treats Black men as innately criminal. Floyd had been marked at birth as a quasi-legitimate target for police violence.
Good was not similarly marked. The same ideology that casts all Black men as dangerous predators tends to identify white women as their most vulnerable targets. White supremacists would have you believe that they’re trying to protect people like Renee Good from people like George Floyd. Instead, Floyd and Good were both sacrificed to the same false god.
Already, members of the Trump Administration and their allies in the media have been editing their taxonomy so that Good falls into the same category of disposable persons as Floyd. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described her as a domestic terrorist. Right-wing pundit Erick Erickson called her an “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal).” Presumably it’s the UL that authorizes her liquidation, not the AWF. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter why they say she’s been retroactively assigned to the administration’s proscription list. The point is simply that they can do it, and they can do it to whoever they want.
I’ve been reading Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze’s economic history of Nazi Germany, and so I’ve been thinking lately about the relationship between nineteenth century imperialism and Hitler’s attempted conquest of Europe. Many historians and theorists, including Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, have described how the Nazis adapted the tools and justifications of European colonialism to an attack on Europe itself. Sometimes people call this the “imperial boomerang” effect, as if King Leopold hurled a weapon at the Congo that swung around to hit Belgium in the face. I don’t like that metaphor, because it seems like an excessively glib way of spreading blame around. When the Nazis savaged Ukraine, the Ukrainians weren’t reaping what they sowed; they were the vassals of one rapacious empire who happened to be standing in the path of another rapacious empire.
Boomerangs follow a predictable arc. The so-called imperial boomerang is more like a deadly toxin that spreads in all directions, attacking the lungs and nervous systems of whoever happens to be standing nearby. Because the myth of racial superiority that justified imperialism was a fantasy, contingent geopolitical conditions were only thing that really protected the European metropoles from colonization. Similarly, if the American state can designate Black people and immigrants as homo sacers, then political expediency is the only thing that prevents its masters from doing that to any other class of people. If circumstances change, or if the governing regime simply refuses to acknowledge political necessity, then no one else is actually protected by the law. Not even young white mothers, provided they’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
As with imperialism, the logical endpoint of domestic racist hierarchy is totalitarianism, a system in which individual human life is superfluous except as a resource for extraction. We’re not there yet, and I find it unlikely we’ll get there, but that’s the America that the Trump Administration is trying to build, using a combination of both novel techniques and older, homegrown sources of reaction. It’s a world where no one, not even Kristi Noem or Erick Erickson, is anything other than disposable.
But Renee Good’s life wasn’t theirs to dispose of, and neither was George Floyd’s. I think a large majority of Americans understand this, and that many of them also understand their lives will be all but forfeit in the world that the aspiring totalitarians of the MAGA movement want. That’s why I don’t believe that things can continue like this indefinitely. It may come in 2029 or it may come sooner, but we are headed for a reckoning. It’s going to be louder and more indiscriminate than any boomerang.