Protesters at Foley Square, NYC, on January 7, 2026, by the federal government building protesting the ICE killing of Renee Good hours earlier Credit: Wikimedia / Creative Commons / SWinxy

“They shoot the white girl first,” the narrator of Toni Morrison’s “Paradise” tells us. 

Morrison opens “Paradise” with a sentence so blunt, so morally freighted, that it refuses comfort. She understood that violence in America is never random. 

It is ordered. It is hierarchical and patriarchal. It follows rules, even when those rules pretend to be chaos. 

“They shoot the white girl first,” the narrator tells us, “with the rest, they can take their time.”

At this moment, Morrison’s lines read less like literature and more like prophecy.

Last week in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good — a white woman, a citizen, a mother of three — three times in the face during what federal authorities have described as a “law enforcement action.” Good was not armed. She was in her own neighborhood. She was exercising the most basic democratic right: protest, resisting the federal government’s increasingly violent campaign of immigrant persecution carried out in American streets.

While Morrison’s critical opening line underscores the shock of a nation unaccustomed to seeing a white woman gunned down by federal agents, it must not obscure the broader reality of violence wrought by immigration enforcement. This moment has understandably galvanized unprecedented mainstream coverage, but in the 48 hours around Good’s killing, federal agents also wounded two Venezuelan immigrants in Portland during related enforcement operations, reminding us that Black and Brown men and women have borne the brunt of this crackdown with far less public notice. 

Acknowledging the layered carnage of ICE raids does not diminish the outcry sparked by Good’s death. It deepens our understanding of whose lives have long been marginalized in both policy and press.

Law enforcement, white supremacy and violence

This happened in Minneapolis. The same Minneapolis still trying to heal from the murder of George Floyd. The same city where trust in law enforcement was shattered in full daylight, under a knee, while the world watched. That this new act of state violence unfolded only blocks away from where Floyd was killed is no coincidence. It is continuity.

What we are witnessing is the convergence of three forces that have always traveled together in American history: patriarchy, white supremacy, and authoritarian nationalism, now amplified by an erosion of public faith in law enforcement itself.

The federal government promised, during the campaign that ushered in this second Trump presidency, that immigration enforcement would target “criminals.” That promise was always a lie. The math was never mathing. 

Instead, what we see is indiscriminate violence, roving federal agents, and a permission structure that rewards escalation rather than restraint. ICE agents now patrol American cities like an occupying force, detaining citizens, intimidating residents, and only incidentally apprehending undocumented people.

And when violence finally spilled over — when an ICE agent shot a white woman in the face — something shifted.

If you watch the cable news coverage closely, you can see it in the eyes of white pundits and anchors: alarm. A kind of alarm that was at times absent when George Floyd was murdered in public view. The unspoken question flickers behind the talking points: How could this happen to her?

The complicity of women

That implicit question tells us everything.

Suppose it matters now that Renee Nicole Good was white, suppose it matters that she was a citizen, or that she was a mother. Suppose it matters that she was in her own neighborhood. Then we are finally forced to confront the truth Morrison exposed decades ago: American violence is tolerated unless or until it crosses an imagined racial boundary. This is where patriarchy enters the frame.

Patriarchy is not simply about men wielding power; it is about a culture that sanctifies force, elevates domination, and treats restraint as weakness. “Shoot first, obscure later” is not a policing error—it is a governing philosophy. Questions come only after conclusions. Investigations are stifled before they begin. The FBI’s sidelining of local investigators in the Good shooting is not bureaucratic dysfunction; it is authoritarian design.

And it matters that the architects of this system include women who perform patriarchy rather than challenge it. No number of tactical vests, cowboy hats, or staged photo ops in front of shackled Latino men in foreign prisons can obscure the reality: women like Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem are not counterweights to patriarchal power; they are its functionaries. They give authoritarian masculinity a softer face while advancing its most brutal policies.

White supremacy, meanwhile, is the ideological bedrock beneath it all. The administration’s immigration agenda is animated by a single, corrosive belief: that America belongs to one ethnicity, one religion, one class. This is white ethnonationalism dressed up as border security. And as history has repeatedly shown us, it does not stop with immigrants. It metastasizes. It turns inward. It always comes for more.

Which brings us back to Morrison.

What is this country now?

“They shoot the white girl first.” Because when they do, the system reveals itself. The illusion cracks. If a white, citizen mother can be executed in broad daylight by a federal agent, then the lie of protection collapses entirely. 

That is why protests have erupted nationwide. Not just outrage over Renee Nicole Good’s death, but in recognition of what it signals. 

This was not an anomaly. It was a warning.

Belonging is the central question here. Who belongs? Who is protected? Who is disposable? If citizenship does not shield you, if whiteness does not shield you, if motherhood does not shield you, then what does? If we are no longer free to resist, if law enforcement no longer serves or protects, if investigations are buried and violence excused, then we must ask, with urgency and honesty, what kind of nation are we living in?

Morrison’s answer lingers uncomfortably close. They may shoot the white girl first. But with the rest of us, they believe they have time. The question is whether we will act as if that time is already running out, because history tells us it always is. 

Ultimately, all of us must wrestle with this idea: It’s only a matter of time before they come for you.

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