Editor’s note:
Almost exactly five years ago, I wrote a short reflection on this website asking all of us to remember the full legacy and dream of Dr. King. Not just the fight for equality under the law for Black and brown people in this country, but also greater economic equality for working people of all backgrounds.
King seemed to realize this would be the harder fight, because it sought to undermine not just the racist social order of America, but to radically redistribute our economic order. The piece I wrote relied heavily on an earlier essay in The Paris Review by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a scholar of black radical traditions, which was focused on King’s anticapitalism. (If you only have time to read one, read hers.)
King did not believe his work was done after passage of the Civil Rights Act. In American capitalism, freedom under the law is a kind of second class freedom. King’s belief was that economic freedom is so much more powerful.
And while that message might seem a little beside the point amid the racial violence plaguing us in 2026, take a closer look: as the United States is becoming more of a crony capitalist oligarchy by the day, it’s also crystal clear that King’s analysis was exactly correct.
The erosion of civil rights, the wholesale racist dehumanization of entire groups of people, the wanton murder of unarmed civilians engaging in civil disobedience — every aspect of the racist backsliding King was worried about hasn’t just returned. It has returned turbo-charged and funded by capitalist grievance.
Every day we live under this regime of hate proves King’s final days more and more prophetic.
Until we achieve a truly egalitarian revolution of our economic order, the civil rights we take such comfort in, no matter how strongly encoded, can be unwound given enough time and money.
In other words: solidarity is survival.
That’s why it feels appropriate today to publish the following short essay from Judy Rohrer — a middle-class queer white person — on the martyred Renee Good — a middle-class queer white lady — and the importance of using whatever power we have as individuals to block the power of the state from terrorizing those that have even less than us.
Because although it may seem like we’re hopelessly far from King’s full egalitarian vision — and hell, even far from where we were in 2021 — the first step remains the same: All of us must put ourselves in harm’s way.
We must use our bodies to overwhelm the state’s capacity to oppress.
We must all commit to being part of a mass movement of people that cuts across not just racial difference, but also across economic difference.
We must do this to not just beat back the horrors currently surrounding us, and to prepare for whatever new horrors might come, but to begin building the conditions where those horrors are vanquished completely, and hopefully forever.
ICE is now the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States. The financial resources it commands are staggering.
Despite that, what’s happening in Minneapolis shows that all the money in the world cannot beat a determined, mobilized mass resistance. More than ever in my life, we need that mass resistance to spread across the country. Yes, that means Spokane. And yes, that very much includes and even demands middle-class white people stand against this murderous barbarism.
And those of us who are middle class, and who are white, need to do even more than stand arm-in-arm. We should stand in front, as human shields.
The escalation of state violence requires an escalation of mass resistance. They’ve got the money, but we have the people.
After the death of Renee Good, no one in America can pretend they aren’t a potential target of the state, and no one can pretend to think they won’t kill us for resisting, because they already have.
It’s still true, though, that there is tremendous strength in numbers.
We need every bit of that strength to ensure that 1) try as they might, they can’t kill us all, and because 2) a world where ICE no longer exists is going to take all of us to build.
— Luke
Column: Renée Good knew MLK’s Lesson: White Silence is Violence
There’s been a lot of focus on Renée Nicole Maklin Good as a mom. Parenthood is frequently used to construct a narrative of innocent victimhood, often while other complicating elements of a person’s identity are obscured. Good was a mother of three and her murder at the hands of the state will shape the rest of their lives. She was also a queer race traitor, and we’ve heard less about that.
We can’t know the mind of Jonathan Ross but, as Autumn Brown said, “Renee Good was not killed despite being white. She was killed because she’s a white woman aligned with the cause of freedom.” I believe her whiteness and queerness stoked Ross’s vitriolic murderous rage. “Fucking bitch” carries a lot of intersecting hateful connotations. Those of us who are queer white women or gender non-conforming people have had those words spit at us by white men. We always know why.
Renée Good broke the rules. As the protest signs have proclaimed, she was “Good Trouble,” rather than a traditional “good girl.” She loved a woman. They had a queer family — mini-van, dog and all. She stopped that mini-van in the middle of the street. She did that to help interrupt racist, xenophobic state violence. She stopped to help her immigrant Black and brown neighbors. She could have kept driving. All the rules, all the norms, would have had her keep driving. Rule-abiding, complicit white people, civil (law & order) white people, “good” white people… we keep driving. We look away.
Not Good. She (and her wife) stopped. It was freezing. Armed federal agents were screaming at her, circling her car. She could have closed her window. Instead, she leaned out, smiled, and with relaxed posture and a calm tone said, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Good refused to be intimidated or provoked by toxic, militarized masculinity. Perhaps it was her faith, perhaps she had de-escalation training. Whatever it was, her response was more than many of us could manage. She had taken to heart Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lesson: white silence is violence. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Renée Nicole Good was determined not to be that white moderate. And now thousands are inspired by her moral courage. White people are getting trained and pouring into the streets in Minneapolis with whistles and cell phones, red cards and groceries. They have, to quote King again, “grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.”
Let’s swell those numbers so we are big in quantity and quality. Let’s form a crowd and stay loud. Let’s confront “the fierce urgency of now.” Let’s “recognize the urgency of the moment.” Let’s be race traitors. Let’s break unjust laws. Let’s make “Good trouble.” Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo!
— Judy Rohrer
