A wake-up call for white Americans

[marmar]

A wake-up call for white Americans
The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are forcing white people to face hard truths about power and violence

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published February 1, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is.

....(snip)....

Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”

....(snip)....

But her sentiments are common among people who are gathering at protests, community meetings and town halls all across the country.

Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.

....(snip)....

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”

“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. “Of course, the very idea that certain people, by virtue of their characteristics, don’t deserve to be brutalized, caged, or killed by police is the problem… Centering someone’s innocence clouds the case for abolition, which seeks to create a world where no one is caged or gunned down even if they broke the law. No matter who she was, what she looked like, her marital or citizenship status, or what she might have done in the past or even in the moment, Good had the absolute right not to be shot for driving away.” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/01/a-wake-up-call-for-white-americans/

[justaprogressive]

1. "willfully ignorant of her own country's history, "

Sometimes you have to slap them. - Frank Cross

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Uncle Joe]

3. People learn things at different times for no one's life is the copy of another.

We also learn different lessons from the same experience or event depending on where we're located at on our moral compass.

Thanks for the thread marmar.