ICE Killed A White Mother. Why Are The President And Other White Men Cheering?

The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Tuesday is not just another case of militarized immigration enforcement gone wrong. It is a rupture in a social contract that long promised white women safety in exchange for compliance. And it is also a chilling illustration of just how quickly that promise evaporates when women challenge authority. 

This is a truth that Black women have known quite well for centuries. We learned it through enslavement, through lynching, policing, medical violence, the War on Drugs, and through the casual disregard for our pain, fear, and the lives of our children who’ve been stolen from us. We learn early that womanhood does not protect you when power feels threatened, that obedience is never sufficient enough to secure your survival, and that the state’s violence is not tempered by femininity or care.

White women, however, have long been allowed a different illusion.

They were taught by law, culture, and by proximity to whiteness that their bodies were protected terrain. That their compliance would be rewarded with safety. That motherhood softened force. That respectability functioned as armor. That even when the state was brutal, it was brutal elsewhere.

But what happened in Minneapolis made clear that the protection white women were promised is only conditional.

The speed and ferocity with which her killing has been defended and mocked, mostly loudly by white men invoking obedience, law, and order, and amplified by Donald Trump’s cruelty, reveals a deeper reality. The protections tied to whiteness, womanhood, and motherhood are thinning fast in an authoritarian culture increasingly comfortable with brute force. 

What has made this moment so unmistakably vicious is not just the defense of Good’s killing, but that it has been so saturated with misogynistic pleasure. The comments I’ve seen across my own social media timelines and threads are gleeful. I’m seeing white men say things like “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” “FAFO.”  I’m seeing mostly white men congratulating themselves on the neatness of her death, on the clarity of the punishment, on the satisfaction of watching a woman be made an example of. 

And that pleasure did not stay confined to comment sections.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters did not focus on the disputed facts of the shooting or the gravity of a civilian death. He chose instead to fixate on personal identity. He mocked her for having pronouns in her bio and emphasizing that she left behind a lesbian partner. In death, she was not treated as a citizen or a mother, but as a bundle of cultural offenses. Her politics. Her gender expression. Her sexuality. All of it has been offered up as context for why sympathy for her is unnecessary.

The sneer about pronouns did the same work as the FAFO chants. It stripped her of dignity and recoded her life as provocation. It told the audience how to feel about her death, and who this violence is meant for. Not just women who block vans or film agents, but women who step outside traditional gender roles, who love the wrong people, who signal the wrong politics, who refuse to make themselves small enough to be acceptable.

That framing did not stay isolated. It echoed across right-wing media and social platforms, where commentators and influencers followed the same script by loading her with markers of ideological deviance and recasting the killing as a consequence. Pronouns became evidence. Her sexuality became an indictment, and her political alignment became a justification. She was that kind of woman who was too political, too queer, and too defiant. The point was not to explain what happened, but to explain why it didn’t matter.

Then there was Donald Trump and his smug, cruel response. He didn’t bother waiting for facts. He rushed to assign blame, to praise force, to turn a killing into a lesson. He framed Good as disorderly, aggressive, and deserving long before investigators had finished their first pass. What he did was grant permission. Permission to sneer. Permission to justify. Permission to enjoy the killing because he hates white women like Good. He told his audience exactly how to feel about a white woman killed by the state: be satisfied that order had been restored. 

And that is why so many white men are defending this killing so confidently and loudly.

What we are watching is not just a defense of one killing. It is the latest front in a long, escalating war on women, particularly white women who refuse to stay in their assigned lane.

This war has never been waged all at once. It has been fought through ridicule first. Through the steady degradation of women’s credibility, judgment, and authority. Through the sneering language of a misogynistic president and incels harassing women online. 

The war on women has been waged through the stripping of reproductive autonomy via courts and legislatures reaching directly into women’s bodies, forcing pregnancy, criminalizing miscarriage, threatening doctors, surveilling menstrual cycles, and turning childbirth into a site of state coercion. It has been waged by a sitting president bragging about sexual assault, stacking courts with men hostile to women’s freedom, and openly punishing women who refuse submission with public humiliation and cruelty.

It has been waged through economic violence on women pushed out of jobs for being “too political,” too outspoken, too disruptive, too feminist, too queer, too allied with movements that threaten male authority. Through workplace retaliation, harassment campaigns, doxxing, and blacklisting. Through the steady message that dissent will cost you your livelihood.

It has been waged through bodily danger, with women being beaten by police at protests, tackled, pepper-sprayed, kettled, arrested, and mocked for it. Through the normalization of sexual threats online, the casual circulation of rape fantasies aimed at writers and politically active women, and the constant reminder that punishment will be intimate, humiliating, and personal.

It has been waged through law enforcement’s reframing of women’s political presence as obstruction, disorder, and threat. Through the tightening association between protest and criminality. Through the growing acceptance that force is an appropriate response to women who refuse to move, refuse to defer, refuse to be quiet.

And now, a white woman is shot and killed by a federal agent. That is not a departure from the war. It is its logical endpoint. A capstone.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good is the moment when all of these threads, from control over women’s bodies and punishment for political dissent, to the celebration of force and the erosion of restraint, collapsed into a single lethal moment.

That is why this killing feels different. Not because the violence is new, but because it completes the arc. Because it confirms that the war on women has reached a stage where even whiteness and motherhood no longer guarantee safety. And, where the final enforcement mechanism is no longer ridicule, legislation, or economic punishment, but bullets to the face.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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