A few years ago, towards the end of the second Obama administration, a friend and her wife flew back to New York from a holiday in Mexico, landing for a connecting flight in South Carolina. At immigration, the officer looked from one to the other, asked their relation to one another and on receiving the reply, made a noise of disgust – “ugh”. On the pretext that American citizens can’t go through the same lane as a spouse on a green card (not true), he sent them to the back of the line, causing them to miss their connection. But that’s not the point of the story.
My friend is a white Australian who is generally conflict-averse; her wife is a Japanese-American who can stop traffic with a single, hard stare, and who teaches in the South Bronx, where many of her students have been harassed by law enforcement since the day they were born. As trouble got under way, my friend kicked off like a good’un, swearing and muttering sarcastically in the Australian style, while her wife shot her desperate, angry looks. Shut up. Shut Up. SHUT UP.
I have been thinking about this incident a lot since the death last week of Renee Good, the Minnesota woman fatally shot by an ICE agent. The use of deadly force was justified on grounds of self-defence, according to the US administration. That explanation doesn’t appear to be borne out by the videos, but the thing I also keep thinking about is the way in which, immediately prior to the shots being fired, Good and her wife, Becca, addressed the agent. “You wanna come at us?” says Becca, in the agent’s general direction. “I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” When the officer approaches Good’s open car window, she smiles, addresses him as “dude” and says mockingly: “I’m not mad at you.”
It goes without saying that in a healthy democracy, mouthing off at authority shouldn’t constitute putting oneself in mortal danger; sarcasm is my stress response, too. But this assumes that civic norms apply. This is the US, where even in normal times use of deadly force by cops isn’t an infrequent occurrence – a conservative estimate by the University of Illinois puts the average number of people killed annually by US law enforcement at 600. We may not yet have all the facts surrounding what motivated the ICE agent to use deadly force, but on the evidence of the videos alone, it seems to me apparent that both Good and her wife made a single, terrible, understandable miscalculation: they underestimated the danger they were in.
Some commentary on the right has suggested that the jocular tone adopted by the women is an indication of their political glibness; that they were somehow “playing” at protest. I don’t think this is true. It did, however, suggest a sheltered understanding of the country they’re living in, and one that isn’t unique to their side. The invasion of the US Capitol on January 6 by crowds, some dressed for a costume party, resulted in the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Maga martyr who was shot and killed by police. Participating in a violent mob invading the seat of government isn’t the same thing as driving away from law enforcement. But in both cases, apparently deeply felt political convictions were expressed with a levity – a larky tone of protest – premised on assumptions of safety.
It’s a devastating misapprehension. A few years after my friend’s trouble in South Carolina, I was pulled out of the passport line at JFK airport and made to sit in a side room for questioning. My indignation was total. I swore, I carried on. As my two toddlers screamed, I felt the phrase “I’m a British citizen!” bubble up through my system like a character from a Paul Scott novel. After three hours with no toilet or phone access, I was released to go home, whereupon I relayed the story to my partner at the time as if returning from war, a conquering hero.
She looked at me coldly. “You’re a fucking idiot,” she said, when I told her how rude I’d been. “What if they’d asked you where the girls’ father is? And why aren’t you travelling with their birth certificates?” I couldn’t believe that I was getting grief off this person who has never met a cab driver she couldn’t start a fight with – but then, her antecedents were murdered by Nazis. She understands a real threat when she sees it. Nothing should take away from Good’s courage or convictions. But there are lessons to be learned: a system that puts paramilitaries on US streets to round people up willy-nilly should be approached by those protesting with the understanding that there is nothing – nothing – it won’t do to shut them up.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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