Saida Grundy, “America’s contract to protect white women has always been tenuous”
The Birth of a Nation’s three-hour runtime is driven by a simplistic message that Black political power is a peril to white womanhood, and that white women are “virtuous” and “unblemished” so long as they are loyal to white masculinity. The presumed innocence of white femininity has served as the necessary political foil to the criminality of Black citizens and now, as we are seeing today, racialized immigrants.
For the right, the killings of people like Floyd by a police officer, or Keith Porter Jr by an off-duty ICE agent, needed only be justified by the victims’ Blackness, as they were assumed to be inherently delinquent. The justification of Good’s killing, on the other hand, requires a bit more cunning. The proper role of a white woman as a vector of racial purity is at the bedrock of the racial hierarchy. But narratives about threats to white womanhood are only as useful as white men are able to deploy them to harm and hegemonize others. Racial barbarity under the guise of protecting purity presupposes that respectable white femininity can be tarnished by even the appearance of sympathy for antiracist politics and communities of color.
Karen E. Park, “Thrift-Store Bibles and the Execution of Renee Good”
Those thrift store Bibles are still out there, still being given to women and girls like Renee Nicole Good and the little girl with the purple marker, camouflaged as harmlessly inspirational and uplifting.
Renee Nicole Good mashed those Bibles into plastic trash bags along with the equally worthless himalayan salt lamp, and dropped them off at the thrift store, because she knew their true cost. In her honor, Christians must reject what she called the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind of Christianity, and we must all oppose the violence it engenders.
Dessa, “How to Resist Like Minneapolis”
This will be the rule that is most impossible to follow.
Because it all comes in too quickly to be filed in the mind. The local reporter will be tear gassed, a fellow musician will be tear gassed, a baby will be tear gassed. A Somali friend tells of rumors of denaturalization, wherein citizenship will be revoked. The mayor says agents have started going door to door, asking where “the Asian people” live. Cars are left running on the streets after their drivers have been pulled out and detained. Volunteers delivering food to families in hiding will be told not to use their phones to navigate—better to write the addresses on paper and if pulled over, eat it. There will be a video. And then another. There will be a pink jacket and a rabbit-eared hat.
Citizen’s testimony, Surprise, Arizona, City Council Meeting, February 3, 2026
Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”
— Arizona Right Watch (@azrww.bsky.social) 2026-02-04T06:43:48.091Z
Joel Cook, “Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow”
But back in 1898, people froze. Understandably. It was hard to accept that just over 30 years after the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history, the men the nation defeated in that war were willing to bring about extreme violence again and drag the country back to their “good ole days.” But they were, dear reader. And they did. In November 1898, Confederates and sons of Confederates overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, murdered dozens of Black citizens (according to conservative accounts), and forced the state to capitulate to white supremacy. The difference between now and then is we have then to look back on. Don’t freeze. Fight.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, “Deuteronomy’s Liberation Theology”
Deuteronomy is profoundly subversive in this way.
This is the same message that we saw in Exodus, in a different key: We don’t serve Pharaoh, we serve God. We don’t serve the Assyrian king, we serve God.
Later, our Rabbinic texts will say, in a thousand ways: We don’t serve the Roman emperor, we serve God.
And maybe it’s the renunciation of Empire is one of the most enduring religious concepts across time and place.
George Clinton, “On Alien Encounters and Trump’s Lack of Funk”
It’s all one world, one planet and one groove. You’re supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that. You see that rocket ship leave yesterday? We can maybe leave this planet. We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers! They could be ready to party, or they could be ready to eat us. We don’t know, but we’ve got to get over this shit of not getting along with each other.
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