Death of an American Propaganda Point

Renee Nicole Good

The internet reacted emphatically to Minneapolis mother and poet Renee Nicole Good’s gratuitous, on-camera murder. As it should, because it exposes the moral and legal rot underlying American law enforcement during the Taco Administration. But more-informed critics than me wondered why the internet didn’t respond with equal passion to ICE’s assassination of Keith Porter in Los Angeles. Do netizens care less because Porter is male and Black?

Porter’s death was, if anything, more egregious than Good’s murder. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, acted under color of authority, and therefore probably has qualified immunity. Porter’s murderer, who remains unidentified, was off-duty, and therefore has no such administrative protections. But of course, Americans aren’t shocked and horrified by Black men’s deaths as we are with White women. I suggest this reveals a deeper division.

Northwestern University historian Kathleen Belew, in her 2018 book Bring the War Home, describes how Vietnam-era propaganda became instrumental to the White Power movement when defeated veterans returned to America. That war emphasized the importance of fending off Soviet Communism to protect, as Belew writes, “wives and daughters back home.” This language wasn’t necessarily racial, as America’s military in the 1970s was substantially integrated.

However, that doesn’t mean the racial implication didn’t exist. Yale historian Greg Grandin writes that race has often loomed large in America’s overseas engagement propaganda. America’s first overseas engagement, the Spanish-American War, involved driving the Spanish out of Cuba and the Philippines (in the 19^th Century, Americans didn’t perceive Spaniards as White). This racist rhetoric persisted through generations of American overseas wars.

In short, over 130 years of American propaganda has conflated American moral virtues with White femininity. This has sometimes been depicted literally, with the goddess Lady Columbia, an Anglo-Saxon beauty in sexy body armor, sallying forth before the male army. More recently, the older, more stoic Lady Liberty has displaced Columbia, but the pattern remains the same: propagandists depict American goodness and White womanhood as synonymous.

(This pattern is common, but not universal. France has the similar goddess Marianne, but Britain has the more male, and more pugnacious, John Bull.)

Keith Porter

Nor is this unique to wartime. Legendary journalist Ida B. Wells wrote, clear back in 1892, that America justified lynchings by emphasizing the supposed threat sexually rapacious Black men posed to defenseless White women. Then as now, this was a lie, but that lie served many Americans’ pre-exiting beliefs. Ibram X. Kendi describes how American domestic propaganda conflated White female weakness with virtue, and Black female strength with vice.

To the informed, the pattern becomes overwhelming: White women need protected. This extends from early myths of lascivious enslaved Africans and rampaging Native Americans, to 19^th Century fables of White Slavery and the evils of opium dens, to the fears of Communists and terrorists who will kidnap American women into sexual servitude. Today’s willingness to suspend civil liberties to fend against “human trafficking” merely continues the pattern.

Early attempts to DARVO the blame onto Renee Good have proven laughable. President Taco claimed her killer, Agent Jonathan Ross, was critically injured; he not only walked away, but never dropped his phone. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a domestic terrorist; Good, a mom, had just dropped her kids at school. It all devolves the same way, that Ross targeted and murdered a White woman without cause.

Therefore, Ross didn’t merely kill one woman. He violated over 130 years of American propaganda, military and civilian. Overseas wars, draconian law enforcement crackdowns, and a criminal justice system that’s never completely expunged its racist past, have all been justified by the urgent need to protect White women. Defenders of the status quo love naming white women like Laken Riley or Iryna Zarutska to justify nakedly racist crackdowns.

Indeed, the first words from Ross’s mouth after the shooting reveal the underlying thought process. “Fucking bitch,” he snarled, still on camera. Throughout American propaganda history, the machine has expected White women to shut up, do nothing in their own defense, and accept male protection, whether they want it or not. Good showed self-determination enough to drive away, which pushed her outside the bounds of propagandistic protection.

Without the rhetorical condom of American propaganda, the Minneapolis invasion stands exposed as what it is, bigoted cruelty wrapped in the flag. If White women aren’t protected, the entire operation merely exists to hurt those the Administration deems unworthy of defense. And because the operation turned against the one group most needful of protection, the implication beomes: You’re Next.