Empathy at Scale

When the protections of empire no longer protects you.

Viola Liuzzo – white woman, Detroit housewife, murdered by the Klan in 1965 after driving marchers during Selma.

Heather Heyer – white woman, killed in 2017 by a neo-Nazi who rammed his car into anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville.

Renee Nicole Good – white woman, 37, killed by an ICE agent in Minnesota today.

The unstated law of white supremacy is white women's bodies should be “protected.” No white women? No more white people. For the most part, this law remains in effect.

Until it doesn't.

Step out of line and the machine that was built to protect “people like you” turns and eats you the second you choose the wrong side.

When white women die by the same forces that have been killing Black and Brown folks for centuries, it punctures the “it’s not that bad” story for a whole swath of people who only move when they see their own in the body count.

This is recruitment by atrocity.

Not in a cynical “good, now they’ll care” way. In a brutal, historically accurate way. Liuzzo’s murder radicalized white liberal imaginations about the Klan. Heyer’s death did that for neo-Nazis and “very fine people” discourse.

Good’s killing will likely play that role for ICE / deportation / “law and order.”

It shouldn’t take this. It always has.

You’re watching the boundary of “safe whiteness” shrink in real time. The circle of “people whose lives are presumed inviolable” is getting smaller. That’s terrifying and clarifying. When the shield fails for the people who were supposed to have one, “neutrality” starts to look like:

"Oh. It can be us too."

If Viola Liuzzo, Heather Heyer, and Renee Nicole Good share anything beyond their deaths, it’s this: They mark the moments when white womanhood stopped being an untouchable shield and became just another kind of flesh in the way of the state.

Middle castes’ exemptions are being revoked.

The people who once could trust “they’d never do that to me” are finding out there’s no such guarantee. For centuries, whiteness functioned like a shield. Not evenly, not for everyone, just enough to justify "we the people" and "those people."

Liuzzo, Heyer, and Good are the cracks where the shield fails in public.

You can treat Renee’s name as another tragic headline that proves nothing and changes nothing. Or you can treat hers like Liuzzo’s and Heyer’s—a flare on the horizon, telling you the map you thought you lived inside is already gone. If you are newly afraid because you see yourself in Renee, don’t bring your guilt.

Bring your courage. Bring your bodies. Bring your empathy.

Outrage will spike, trend, and decay. Empathy—the kind that admits ‘it can be us, it already was them’—is the only thing that’s ever changed anything.

Empathy, if we let it, can braid Black grief, Jewish grief, immigrant grief, queer grief, and the grief of people who thought they were safe until they weren’t.

The machine built to protect “people like you” will eat you the second you pick the wrong side. Empire knows how to fight outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale.

Renee Good’s life deserved more than to be a lesson. The least we can do is learn the right thing from it.