EDITORS' CORNER
Good ‘refused to be intimidated or provoked by militarized toxic masculinity’
Only a far-left “studies” professor could offer a take on Renee Good’s killing like this: She had to act because she knew white people doing nothing is just like actual violence.
So says Judy Rohrer, program director of Eastern Washington University’s Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies Department.
Writing in Range Media, Rohrer says Good, killed by an ICE agent after striking him with her car, was a “queer race traitor” — she “broke the rules,” as it were, by “loving a woman,” “having a queer family,” and most of all stopping her vehicle in the middle of street to interrupt ICE operations in Minneapolis.
“[Good] did that to help interrupt racist, xenophobic state violence,” Rohrer writes. “She stopped to help her immigrant Black and brown neighbors. She could have kept driving. All the rules, all the norms, would have had her keep driving. Rule-abiding, complicit white people, civil (law & order) white people, ‘good’ white people… keep driving.”
Good “refused to be intimidated or provoked by militarized toxic masculinity,” Rohrer continues, and then invokes Martin Luther King Jr. who had written that blacks’ “great stumbling block” in the quest for freedom and full civil rights wasn’t the Klan and associated sympathizers, but white “moderates” who are “more devoted to order than to justice [and] prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Rohrer’s piece is preceded by a message from Range Editor Luke Baumgarten, a Spokane, Washington-based community organizer who says “every aspect of the racist backsliding [Dr.] King was worried about hasn’t just returned. It has returned turbo-charged and funded by capitalist grievance.”
He adds “middle-class white people” need to take a stand against the “murderous barbarism” that’s occurring, and indeed “should stand in front, as human shields.”
“We need every bit of that strength to ensure that 1) try as they might, they can’t kill us all, and because 2) a world where ICE no longer exists is going to take all of us to build,” Baumgartner concludes.
According to her faculty page, Rohrer “worked for progressive nonprofits” in Hawaii and San Francisco and was “a scholar-in-residence” at UC Berkeley’s Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. Her areas of expertise include:
Rohrer is author of the article “We Are Not (Yet) Nonbinary” which is directed at “other white temporarily-able-bodied settler feminists interested in moving, not just toward a queer (queerer?) horizon, but toward a nonbinary liberatory futurity as a collective political aspiration.”
She also argued Trump’s border wall and the sea wall at Barack Obama’s Hawaii residence are examples of the “fortification [of] settler colonialism.”
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