White Americans Aren’t Safe Either - What many are reacting to now is not novelty, but proximity

When Black People Warned You, And The Warning Becomes The Headline

By SDC News One, IFS News Writers

WEST SACRAMENTO CA [IFS] -- For centuries, Black Americans have tried to explain—sometimes calmly, sometimes in anguish, sometimes through protest, sometimes through art—how state power in the United States expands, tests itself, and normalizes violence first on the most disposable bodies it can find. The warning has been consistent: what is tolerated when done to Black people rarely stays contained there.

In early 2025 and into 2026, that warning moved from footnotes to front pages.

The killings of American citizens during ICE-related operations—Keith Porter Jr., Renée Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti—have forced a reckoning that many Black Americans say feels grimly familiar. The shock now rippling through parts of the country is not that people were killed by the state, but that the victims include people who were previously assumed to be insulated from that fate.

That distinction matters. Because when Eric Garner was choked to death on a Staten Island sidewalk; when Michael Brown’s body lay uncovered in Ferguson; when Tamir Rice was shot within seconds of police arrival; when Philando Castile calmly narrated his own death during a traffic stop; when Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail; when Breonna Taylor was gunned down in her own home—those deaths were met not with national alarm, but with excuses. Compliance was questioned. Backgrounds were scrutinized. Blame was reassigned. Sympathy was conditional.

Black Americans noticed.

And they warned everyone else.

The Pattern, Not the Exception

Keith Porter Jr.’s name barely registered in mainstream coverage. A Black man killed by ICE, shot from behind, with no viral video, no sustained outrage, no major fundraiser. His death lived largely on Black social media, circulating through Facebook posts and X threads, where people asked a bitterly familiar question: If no one records it, does it count?

When Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti—both white—were killed, the tone shifted. Suddenly the language became “unprecedented.” Suddenly people asked whether America was “losing itself.” Suddenly ICE was described as out of control rather than “just doing its job.”

That contrast is the point Black Americans keep trying to make.

“Nobody cared when the Black man died. But when the white lady and the white guy died—that’s what it took?” one comment asked. “You can’t tell me America isn’t racist. RIP to everyone, but is anyone seeing the pattern?”

This isn’t about ranking grief. It’s about recognizing how attention works—and whose lives have historically been treated as expendable.

A History Written on the Body

The United States did not invent state violence, but it industrialized its logic. From slave patrols to fugitive slave laws, from Jim Crow policing to COINTELPRO, from redlining to mass incarceration, Black communities have long served as the testing ground for surveillance, containment, and force.

Caribbean plantation records tell a chilling story: life expectancy for enslaved Africans was often four to seven years after arrival; if born into slavery, survival to age 21 was considered notable. Rebellions were frequent not because conditions were misunderstood, but because they were unbearable. Violence was not incidental—it was the system.

That logic didn’t vanish with emancipation. It evolved.

LA’s 1992 uprising didn’t emerge from nowhere; it followed decades of policing that treated Black neighborhoods as occupied territory. The civil rights movement itself succeeded in part because the brutality inflicted on Black protesters finally became visible to white Americans through television—and even then, sympathy came slowly.

“First they came for the Communists…” the famous warning by Martin Niemöller reminds us, “then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out.” Black Americans have lived that poem as policy.

“They Aren’t Safe Either”

What many are reacting to now is not novelty, but proximity.

“All that bootlicking just to get kicked in the face is crazy,” one observer wrote. “They aren’t safe either.”

For years, Black activists were told that law-abiding behavior, patriotism, military service, or respectability would provide protection. But history has already answered that claim. Medgar Evers was a veteran. Breonna Taylor was an EMT. Keith Porter Jr. was not protesting. Compliance has never been a shield.

The Second Amendment crowd, once loud about resisting tyranny, has grown noticeably quiet as federal agents kill citizens without consequence. Conservative influencers still find ways to blame the dead. Others mock victims from their own political camps, revealing how conditional solidarity can be.

It has led to a dark, shared realization: this system does not care about human life. It cares about control.

Blame, Always Reassigned

When crisis hits, blame rarely travels upward. It travels sideways—or down.

Black Americans note that when unrest happens, they are blamed reflexively. If World War III broke out tomorrow, some joke grimly, it would still be blamed on Black people. This instinct is not accidental; it is structural. Racial scapegoating has always been a pressure valve for a system unwilling to confront itself.

That scapegoating now extends across communities. Some Hispanic voters who supported hardline immigration policies are discovering that proximity to whiteness offers no guarantee of safety. Internalized racism born of colonial hierarchies has left many unprepared for the reality that enforcement regimes do not stop where campaign slogans say they will.

“They need to fight for their own civil rights,” one comment read. “This is how you know they never acknowledged Black struggles at all.”

Others argue for solidarity anyway—not at the front lines where risk is highest, but through food banks, tracking ICE activity, and mutual aid. The tension between withdrawal and coalition-building is real, and unresolved.

Politics Without Illusions

Many commenters reject the idea that electoral politics alone can solve this moment. Democrats and Republicans alike are criticized for expanding deportations, strengthening police power, and serving corporate interests. Obama-era deportation numbers are cited alongside Trump-era rhetoric to argue that the machinery itself is the problem.

“Blue MAGA, red MAGA,” one person wrote. “Same worship of capitalism. Same system.”

Still, others point out that choices matter—that Project 2025 was public, that authoritarian promises were explicit, that refusing to choose a side is itself a choice. Black voters, especially Black women, turned out overwhelmingly against this direction. Now, some are being asked to save a country that has repeatedly refused to save them.

“We are not your Magical Negro,” one comment stated bluntly.

The Familiar Shock

Perhaps the most striking voices are from outside the United States—viewers from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America—who describe America’s global image as masterful propaganda. From the outside, the contradictions are harder to see. From the inside, Black Americans have been naming them for generations.

A white queer trans woman reflected that when panic spread through white trans communities after Trump’s return, all she could think was: Have you not been paying attention? Bodily autonomy had been stripped from Black women long before it reached others.

That is the recurring theme of this moment: people discovering, late, what others learned early.

This Is America

None of this means the deaths of Renée Good or Alex Pretti matter less. They matter precisely because they fit the pattern. Their names now join a long list of people killed by ICE or in ICE custody in 2025 alone—Keith Porter Jr., Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, Genry Ruiz Guillén, Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Maksym Chernyak, Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez, and many others whose stories rarely make headlines.

Rest in peace to all of them.

But rest cannot replace reckoning.

“This video is needed,” one person wrote, “but some people won’t listen because they don’t think Black history is important until it becomes their history.”

That may be the most accurate summary of the moment we’re in.

Black Americans warned you—not out of spite, not to win an argument, but because survival teaches pattern recognition. The question now is not whether the warning was correct. The evidence is already here.

The question is whether anyone is finally ready to listen—before there’s no one left to warn.

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