I AM RENEE GOOD...
Why #SayHerName is the antithesis to community and solidarity
White women, I want to speak to you — not at you, not through you, but to you, in earnest and in sisterhood.
So before we go any further, let’s slow the body down together.
Take a breath.
Loosen your jaw.
Drop your shoulders.
Take another breath.
Release the reflex to explain yourself before anyone has accused you of anything.
You are not being chastised here.
You are not being shamed.
You are not being pushed out.
I am calling you in.
This is a family conversation, the kind that only works if we stay in the room with one another instead of bracing for impact or rushing to defend our intentions.
And yes, I understand why so many people instinctively reached for #SayHerName when Renee Good was killed by state violence.
It feels right.
It feels aligned.
It feels like a way to show up quickly and visibly.
It already has traction, language, recognition, and emotional shorthand.
In a moment of shock and grief, it makes sense to reach for something that already feels established, something that signals, “I care. I see this. I stand against it.”
That impulse doesn’t make you malicious.
It makes you human.
But here’s where we need to pause — gently, honestly — and look at what’s happening beneath that impulse.
When concerns are raised about using #SayHerName in this moment, the immediate pushback I see is not about facts. It’s not about Renee. It’s not even about disagreement.
It’s about discomfort.
And specifically, it’s about two pillars of supremacy culture that show up hard in white women’s organizing spaces:
Fear of Open Conflict
and
Defensiveness
Fear of Open Conflict tells us that naming a misstep is the same as causing harm. That disagreement equals danger. That being asked to reflect means someone is trying to tear us down rather than invite us deeper.
Defensiveness tells us we must immediately explain our intentions, prove we meant well, or distance ourselves from critique before we even finish listening.
Together, those two forces shut down the very conversations we need in order to build real community.
So when someone says, “Hey, this phrase has a specific history and this may not be the right context,” and the response is tension, dismissal, or “why are we fighting each other right now?” — that’s not solidarity being threatened.
That’s solidarity being avoided.
True community does not require sameness.
True solidarity does not require silence.
And sisterhood that cannot survive thoughtful critique is not strong enough to face what we are actually up against.
We are living in a moment where state violence is expanding, enforcement is emboldened, and the machinery of empire is moving faster and with less accountability.
We cannot afford surface-level alignment anymore.
If we are serious about resisting what is happening, about protecting one another, about building coalitions that last, then we have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of being lovingly corrected without collapsing into shame or defensiveness.
This is not about being “right.”
This is about being responsible to one another.
So I’m asking you, as a sister, not as an adversary:
Stay.
Listen.
Let this be a conversation instead of a reaction.
Because how we practice solidarity with each other is exactly how strong (or how fragile) our movements will be when the pressure increases.
And the pressure is increasing.
A note on sustainability, care, and support
I want to be transparent with you.
This is my work.
This is my labor.
This is how I show up, to write, to teach, to hold nuance, to facilitate hard conversations, and to keep calling us toward deeper, more accountable solidarity.
My goal this year is to reach 1,000 paid subscribers so I can do this work sustainably, without burnout, without urgency, and without diluting the truth to make it more palatable.
If this writing resonates with you, if it stretches you, if it helps you stay in the room instead of checking out, I invite you to support the work financially in whatever way is honest for you.
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and this refusal to flatten or commodify liberation work
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for staying.
And thank you — sincerely — to those who financially support this work so it can continue.
The history of #SayHerName — and why that history matters here
That phrase has a powerful and specific history.
#SayHerName was created by Black feminist organizers (most notably through the work of the African American Policy Forum) because Black women were being murdered by state violence and then erased.
Not misremembered.
Not misunderstood.
Erased.
Their names were absent from headlines.
Their stories were flattened or distorted.
Their deaths were treated as footnotes… if they were acknowledged at all.
Even within movements against police violence, Black women, Black trans women, and Black femmes were routinely sidelined. Their deaths were framed as anomalies, collateral, or “complicated,” while the public narrative centered almost exclusively on Black men.
#SayHerName was a refusal of that erasure.
It was a demand that the world:
acknowledge Black women as targets of state violence
speak their names when institutions would not
insist that their lives mattered enough to be remembered accurately and publicly
The phrase was not about symbolism.
It was about survival, memory, and historical correction.
And that is why the history of why #SayHerName exists matters just as much as the phrase itself.
Because when we lift it out of that context, and when we apply it broadly to every instance of state violence against a woman, we unintentionally undo the very intervention it was meant to make.
Using #SayHerName outside its rooted purpose collapses a specific struggle into a universal gesture. It treats the phrase as a general expression of grief rather than what it actually is: a corrective to the systematic forgetting of Black women killed by the state.
That matters.
Because Renee Nicole Good was not erased.
She was killed in public view and immediately narrativized by power.
Different mechanism.
Same empire.
But not the same history.
When we insist on using #SayHerName here, we unintentionally suggest that Renee’s death fits the same pattern of disappearance, and in doing so, we blur the distinct realities that Black feminist organizers were fighting to make visible in the first place.
This isn’t about rules or purity tests.
It’s about respecting lineage.
Solidarity does not mean using the same words for every wound.
It means learning why those words were forged, and refusing to dull their edge by misapplying them.
Honoring #SayHerName means protecting its specificity, not expanding it until it loses meaning.
And that’s the work this moment is asking of us.
Honoring Renee’s Life and the Violence Done to Her
On January 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good — a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, mother of three, poet, writer, and cherished partner — was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was in her car on a neighborhood street during a federally led immigration enforcement operation when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired into her vehicle, striking her multiple times and ending her life. (wikipedia)
Video recordings of the incident show federal agents surrounding her vehicle and conflicting orders being given as she attempted to move her car. The agent’s shots hit her as her SUV moved — and she died shortly afterward. (wikipedia)
Federal authorities immediately framed the incident as an act of self-defense, asserting that she posed a threat, including claims that she tried to harm the agent with her vehicle. But local leaders, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, rejected that narrative as false and demanded accountability and an independent investigation. (Reuters)
Her wife, Becca Good, described the scene that day in plain, heartbreaking terms:
“We had whistles. They had guns.” — a stark contrast between peaceful presence and overwhelming force. (apnews)
Friends, family, neighbors, and people who knew her describe Renée as compassionate, warm, creative, and deeply devoted to her children. She moved to Minneapolis with her partner and three kids, showing up in her community not as a threat, but as someone who loved fiercely and lived tenderly. (Reuters)
Her loss is not an abstraction.
It is not a statistic.
It is a life ended by the militarized power of the state — federally sanctioned and highly lethal.
And that truth must be spoken clearly:
And that truth must be spoken clearly.
Now I want you to notice something else.
Look at how many sources document her life and her death.
Look at how thoroughly her humanity is preserved.
Look at the photos chosen — smiling, alive, whole.
Look at how much care is taken to tell us who she was.
Even as the administration attempts to frame her as violent, radical, or dangerous, her humanity remains legible. Her story is contextualized. Her relationships are named. Her life is mourned in public.
We are not afforded that same grace.
When Black women are killed by state violence, if and when we are mentioned at all, it is often alongside the worst possible language. The most criminalized framing. The most dehumanizing images. Our lives are reduced to mugshots, rumors, insinuations, and silence.
This is the distinction #SayHerName was created to address.
So when you reflexively reach for #SayHerName in moments like this (without understanding its specific history and purpose) you unintentionally flatten narratives in a way that obscures both the distinct violence Renée experienced and the historical violence Black women have endured under policing and state erasure.
#SayHerName was created to disrupt erasure.
Not to become a catch-all slogan for every death by state violence.
When you apply it here without context, you center your own comfort with familiar language instead of reckoning with what actually happened — and whose histories the phrase was meant to protect.
And there is another layer we must name.
Reaching for #SayHerName here also allows white women to bypass a harder truth:
the violence white women have experienced for centuries at the hands of white men in power, in homes, in policy, in law, and in systems designed to protect white male authority.
Instead of confronting that violence from within whiteness, the phrase becomes a way to redirect the conversation outward. To borrow a struggle rather than sit inside one’s own inheritance. To avoid naming how white patriarchy has always demanded silence, compliance, and disposability… even from the women it claims to protect.
That avoidance is not solidarity.
It is displacement.
That is not community.
That is not sisterhood.
That is narrative convenience.
But if you are willing to do the harder work, if you are willing to acknowledge both the specific brutality done to Renée and the distinct lineage of Black feminist organizing from which #SayHerName emerged, then here is what real solidarity looks like…
