Renee Good and the Rage that Fuels State Violence

We are at JFK, waiting for the ground staff to retrieve our stroller. The baby is crying. He holds his arms out and looks at me, wailing and hot.

Please give him to me, I say quietly.

He’s fine, my husband snaps, and refuses to meet my eye. The baby cries harder.

He’s not fine. He wants me. He wants his mum.

He’s fine.

He’s not. Please, just give him to me. Give him to me?

I’ve started crying now too. Hot milk prickles at my breasts.

No.

Just give him to me! My voice is high and panicked. My baby cries harder. Husband looks at me now, his eyes cold, blue and furious. His voice is low, controlled, a malevolent, vicious undertone. He speaks slow as if there’s a period after every word. Will you stop you psychotic – fucking – bitch.

There are many of us who recognize this word, “bitch,” and the hot, scorching punch of it in this kind of context. After the shots are fired in the footage of Renee Good’s death, a voice can be heard calling her warm, dead body leaking hot blood over children’s stuffies, a “fucking bitch.”

The agonizing moment-by-moment breakdowns, the analysis of angles, the legal justifications, the endless videos which will continue to surface as neighbors trawl through their RING cameras – none of this mattered in that moment. That “fucking bitch”, to those of us who have been victimized by coercive control, was a conviction.

In Civil Protection Orders, the most common gender insult was ‘bitch’. There are so many studies which track the way verbal dehumanization starts to pave the way for eventual violence, from studies with women surviving near fatal attacks, to social worker reports, to beyond. It’s a detail defenders want us to ignore — a slip of the tongue in a stressful moment. But language matters. Slurs emerge when professionalism collapses and something more primal takes over. They reveal how the speaker understands the person in front of them: not as a citizen, not as a human being, but as an object of contempt. The “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis” matters, because it is a sign that common decency will not suffice at a time, at a moment like this, when the breakdown is so acute.

Fucking bitch is not a phrase uttered in desperation, in pain, or in terror, but in anger. In retaliation. It is a sign of verbal dehumanization that signals contempt, not panic. Fury, not fear. How dare you refuse to acknowledge my power. You are worthless.

That contempt is the emotional precondition for violence.

Even before the personal footage believed to belong to Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee surfaced this morning, the rage of that ‘fucking bitch’ slapped me in the face and took me back to a time when the person I trusted most in the world was subjecting both myself and my baby to unrestrained rage on a daily basis. America as an abused spouse is a trope that has been oft repeated throughout Trump’s centuries long regime of terror, which has apparently only been about a year long. Domestic violence is not a shorthand for politics, but rather that the current regime incorporates coercive control as a political technology.

Renee sounds and looks calm in the footage we have. She’s in her car. I imagine the heat blasting, probably a thermos of joe in the cupholder next to the stuffies crammed into the glove compartment. Her hot breath frosts in the frigid Minneapolis morning. Her wife walking outside the car, throwing smart comments out, is pissed. But she’s not out of control. She’s not threatening.  Being annoying, and annoyed, is not grounds for murder. Throwing smart ass comments out to law enforcement is a First Amendment Right. Renee herself is not threatening. She’s de-escalating.

But then that furious hot spat of anger, the anger which rises out of nowhere, the anger which erupts and destroys in seconds, the anger which pops out three bullets because those queer bitches are pissing you off and getting in your way at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, the anger which leaves the victims reeling and screaming on the side of the road saying it’s my fault it was my fault I made her do it while the perpetrator of that rage puts their gun back in their holster and calmly walks around for several minutes showing no visible signs of either injury, distress, fear or sorrow. Just satisfaction.

He looks satisfied.

Rage is not incidental to state violence. Rage is the fuel for state violence. And as every person in a coercive controlling relationship knows, the victim will be blamed and the “fucking bitch” will be manipauletd, until that was never rage at being disobeyed and disrespected, but always fear and desperation and pity. Fear can be perfectly retrofitted onto rage. Panic can be rehearsed after violent consequences have been meted. And they will be accepted by the system because violence is an acceptable corrective when the victim has committed the crime of being black, being queer, being a woman, being an other, or being obviously opposed to the regime.

Domestic violence is always about control. It is about one person’s impossible need to control every single aspect of another person’s life, and the rage emerges from the futility of this exercise. It’s often triggered by something inconsequential: a refusal, a delay, a tone of voice, a choice of words. Looking happy, looking sad, looking queer, looking straight. Control perceives this inconsequential slight as vast humiliation, and responds with excessive punishment.

What we see in the Good footage follows this script with chilling precision. Orders are barked. Compliance is demanded instantly. There is no meaningful attempt to de-escalate, no pause, no retreat. When the situation slips even slightly out of the officer’s control, the response is lethal.

Authoritarian power borrows the same emotional logic as domestic violence.

The tools are familiar: intimidation, humiliation, unpredictability, and the promise of consequences if you don’t comply fast enough, perfectly enough, gratefully enough.

Trump did not invent this logic — but he has normalized it. For Trump and his cronies, violence is not a last resort. It is a corrective, and it is the first instinct.

ICE, in particular, has become a perfect vessel for this ideology with its masked agents, minimal oversight and constant posture of threat. It has instilled an institutional culture that treats civilians as potential enemies and disagreement as provocation. In this context, Ross’s rage is not an aberration. It is how Trump’s America will continue to enforce itself.

What chills me is not whether a jury will find Ross legally justified. It’s that the system seems uninterested in whether rage itself should disqualify someone from holding lethal authority. The state has taught its agents that they should defend reflexively. They have taught law enforcement for years that civilian death, particularly of young black civilian lives, will be litigated as a PR problem rather than a moral one. Over a decade ago, I quoted Malcolm X in an article I wrote about Christopher Dorner, the LAPD cop who went rogue and started killing his colleagues. I was not scared of Dorner, I said. Or no more scared of him than any other cop with a gun in the United States of America. “The chickens come home to roost”. 

The foundation for Trump’s America has been laid in the fabric of American society decades before Tuesday’s horrors. It is no rurpsie that all it took was one vile idiot to build a Trump Tower on top of it and transform the tragedy of American policing into the humanitarian hell that it has become. Renee Good’s death is being processed by the right as an isolated incident, and by the left as a symbol of the horrors of Trump’s America. It isn’t. It is part of a decades-long continuum in which state violence has increasingly resembles the dynamics survivors recognize from private life for: domination framed as protection, punishment framed as necessity, rage framed as fear. Trump was only able to achieve this because America was already rotten before he arrived.

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