Dr. Stacey Patton

01/07/2026

There is a particular kind of national denial that only survives as long as whiteness continues to function as protection. As long as state violence stays correctly aimed at migrants, Black people, the poor, the unhoused, and the politically inconvenient, America finds ways to live with it. Raids without warrants. Hulking masked agents who refuse identification. Folks being shot in the face with tear gas and pepper spray. Folks yanked out of their cars while picking their kids up from school Families ripped apart before sunrise. Deaths in detention reduced to clerical mishaps.

All of it keeps getting absorbed into the bureaucratic language of “law and order,” stripped of urgency, stripped of outrage, and stripped of consequence. What has shattered that denial is not violence itself. It is the breach.

People are not reacting because the state killed someone. They are reacting because it killed someone it wasn’t supposed to. Someone who was meant to be buffered from this machinery by race and sex, citizenship, and familiarity. The anger, the disbelief, the frantic parsing of details are all symptoms of the same realization that the boundary people trusted to keep state violence at a safe distance has failed.

The justifications now being deployed through the fixation on movement, compliance, and threat. None of this was invented yesterday. They were perfected on Black and brown bodies. Refined on migrants. Rehearsed on protesters. For years, white Americans could recite them without ever imagining themselves inside the frame. Renee Nicole Good’s death collapses that distance entirely. It drags whiteness into the line of fire and forces a confrontation many spent decades avoiding.

But now the violence can no longer be managed as someone else’s problem. Because once the state demonstrates it is willing to kill someone like her, the logic holding everything else in place collapses. The comforting belief that violence can be neatly outsourced, that it will remain targeted, disciplined, and socially contained evaporates.

And this is where the story turns genuinely frightening.

Because Americans have already been watching white protesters confront ICE in city after city. They curse agents out. Call them Nazis and traitors. They block and throw things at vans. They shove cameras in masked faces. They refuse to move. For months, that defiance has been tolerated, not because it was harmless, but because it was white. Because it was still legible as civic dissent rather than threat. Because whiteness signaled containable trouble, not lethal resistance.

So when a white woman is shot and killed during one of these charged encounters, it is not an accident. It is a message.

This is how authoritarian power consolidates. It does not begin by terrorizing everybody at once. It begins by brutalizing the folks on the margins while watching who flinches, who excuses it, who learns to live with it. Then, slowly, deliberately, it widens the circle just enough to recalibrate fear. Just enough to make people understand that proximity is no longer protection.

Systems like this do not change when the violence remains socially acceptable. Nooo, Y’all. They change only when it becomes politically costly. And in America, that cost has historically been measured in white bodies.

The people in power know this. You and I know this.

They know that migrant deaths can be absorbed. That Black deaths can be debated into oblivion. That brutality can be normalized so long as it lands where the public has been trained not to see itself. What they also know, coldly and historically, is that nothing forces a reckoning faster than violence that reaches people who were promised safety.

That is why this moment matters. Not because Renee Nicole Good’s life mattered more, but because her death punctures the illusion that there is still a protected class. Because it signals that the state is no longer invested in maintaining the fiction of restraint. Because it tells white Americans, unmistakably, that defiance is being reclassified as danger, and danger is being met with bullets to the face.

Authoritarianism does not announce itself with speeches. It announces itself by changing the consequences. By teaching people, through example, what happens when you block the van, film the agent, refuse to move, or simply exist in the wrong place when power decides it’s done pretending and playin’ with your ass.