{"id":4508,"date":"2026-03-11T01:08:58","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4508"},"modified":"2026-02-24T13:13:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T21:13:32","slug":"reprint-its-different-for-white-men-whiteness-and-gender-inequalities-in-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/03\/11\/reprint-its-different-for-white-men-whiteness-and-gender-inequalities-in-protest\/","title":{"rendered":"Reprint: It’s Different for White Men–Whiteness and Gender Inequalities in Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"

When civil rights protesters are killed, some deaths \u2013 generally those of white people \u2013 resonate\u00a0more<\/h4>\n
\n
Posters memorialize Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two white Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents.
\nAP Photo\/Ryan Murphy<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aniko Bodroghkozy<\/a>, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Renee Good and Alex Pretti<\/a>, two white Minneapolis residents killed in January 2026 by federal agents while protesting the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policy, have become household names. National media outlets continue to focus on their deaths and the circumstances around them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Neither of them was the first person to be shot and killed by immigration enforcement officials over the past year. There have been numerous shootings and some deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In September 2025, Silverio Villegas Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a> was killed in Chicago under circumstances similar to Good\u2019s death. Ruben Ray Martinez<\/a> was shot multiple times by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas in March 2025, but their involvement was not revealed<\/a> until nearly a year later. Neither Martinez nor Villegas Gonz\u00e1lez has become a household name, and their deadly encounters with federal agents have not drawn nearly the same level of media attention as Good\u2019s or Pretti\u2019s.<\/p>\n

As a media historian<\/a>, I\u2019ve been struck by the similarities between the media\u2019s coverage of Minneapolis and its coverage of Selma, Alabama, in 1965<\/a>, when voting rights protests led to violence that left three people dead, including two white victims.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written about the Selma campaign, as well as the media\u2019s treatment of white female activists killed during racial justice protests, in my books \u201cEqual Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement<\/a>\u201d and \u201cMaking #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These two events reveal that the deaths of white activists often draw and sustain far more attention than the deaths of Black or Latino people in similar contexts. But the Selma and Minneapolis events also show that male and female white activist victims aren\u2019t necessarily treated the same way.<\/p>\n

Remembering Selma<\/h6>\n

Video footage of law enforcement beating and gassing marchers<\/a> on Selma\u2019s Edmund Pettus Bridge remains an iconic visual document of the Civil Rights Movement. John Lewis, who later became a congressman, was an activist at the head of the march<\/a> on March 7, 1965, and was beaten in the head at the base of the bridge by Alabama state troopers. But he was not a household name in 1965, and media coverage at the time did not identify him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reporters also didn\u2019t pay much attention to what had motivated the march: the killing of Black voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson<\/a> by an Alabama state trooper during a nighttime march a week earlier.<\/p>\n

\"Martin
Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a eulogy in Selma, Ala., for James Reeb, a fellow minister who was beaten to death.<\/span>
\nAP Photo<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, the prime-time television broadcast<\/a> of footage from \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d at the Pettus Bridge shocked Americans, just as footage from Minneapolis has similarly distressed and disturbed many people today.<\/p>\n

In 1965, a small number of white Americans<\/a> from around the country, including numerous members of the clergy, descended on Selma to stand with the brutalized voting rights activists. They included James Reeb<\/a>, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, and Viola Liuzzo<\/a>, a wife and mother of five from Michigan.<\/p>\n

Reeb, following a second aborted march across the Pettus Bridge two days after Bloody Sunday, was viciously beaten by a group of white racists<\/a> and left lying on the ground, mortally wounded. His beating and subsequent death received plentiful media attention<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Lyndon B. Johnson contacted Reeb\u2019s widow<\/a>. She gave media interviews<\/a> about her husband. Johnson also extolled Reeb at the beginning of his joint address to Congress<\/a> calling for robust voting rights legislation, four days after Reeb\u2019s death. Johnson never mentioned Jackson\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Liuzzo was ferrying people back to Selma from Montgomery on March 25 after the conclusion of the final, successful march to the state capital when a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen<\/a>, one an FBI informant<\/a>, chased her down and shot her through her car window. Her death received even more coverage than Reeb\u2019s<\/a>, keeping Selma in the news.<\/p>\n

The Voting Rights Act<\/a> passed five months later.<\/p>\n

Smearing the victim<\/h6>\n

So how does coverage of Reeb and Liuzzo echo the portrayals of Pretti and Good? And why does it matter?<\/p>\n

Initial media treatment of Liuzzo focused on her status as a wife and mother<\/a>. She was characterized as brave, putting the rights of others above her own. \u201cMrs. Liuzzo \u2018Felt She Had to Help,\u2019\u201d was the headline of a New York Times profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good\u2019s status as a devoted mother and wife also characterized initial media reporting<\/a> following her death. This kind of framing can often shield \u201cnice white ladies<\/a>,\u201d as scholar Jessie Daniels has termed them, from the derogatory treatment that women of color<\/a> have often endured in the public arena.<\/p>\n

But in both cases, although separated by six decades, condemnation, disparagement and misogyny soon followed. Government officials, commentators and far-right forces framed these women and their activism in darker terms. Liuzzo was smeared by a KKK grand wizard who blamed her for her own death<\/a>, saying, \u201cIf this woman was at home with her children where she belonged she wouldn\u2019t have been in any jeopardy.\u201d Liuzzo was falsely accused<\/a> of having sexual relations with a Black man, thereby being characterized as a traitor to the white race.<\/p>\n

\"Three
In 2023, a Detroit monument honoring Viola Liuzzo, who was killed by the Klan, and Sarah Evans, who raised Liuzzo\u2019s children, was unveiled.<\/span>
\nAP Photo\/Corey Williams<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This kind of racist vitriol might have stayed on the fringes, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover amplified the stories<\/a>, while a Detroit police officer\u2019s file on Liuzzo<\/a>, which included highly personal information and speculation about her mental health, was shared with segregationist Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma.<\/p>\n

The material ended up in The New York Times, and Liuzzo\u2019s posthumous reputation was marred<\/a>. When Ladies\u2019 Home Journal polled its readers about Liuzzo, 55% responded that she should have stayed home<\/a> with her children.<\/p>\n

Echoes of the past<\/h6>\n

Official government and law enforcement responses to Good\u2019s death echo the Liuzzo case; in fact, the responses have arguably been magnified. Vice President JD Vance blamed Good for her own death<\/a>, claiming it was a \u201ctragedy of her own making.\u201d President Donald Trump characterized her as \u201cdisorderly\u201d and vicious<\/a>. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials labeled Good a domestic terrorist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This attempt to influence the media\u2019s framing of Renee Good clearly had an impact, since much of the early media coverage focused on questions about her actions<\/a> and motives, with the New York Post<\/a> derisively labeling her an \u201c\u2018ICE Watch\u2019 \u2018warrior\u2019 who trained to resist feds before shooting,\u201d before attention shifted to Pretti\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n

Good, like Liuzzo, was also derided as a race traitor, somehow betraying white Americans by supporting nonwhites. Podcaster Matt Walsh disparaged her for giving her life \u201cto protect 68 IQ Somali scammers<\/a>,\u201d a smear that made its way into mainstream media, including its appearance in an opinion piece<\/a> by The New York Times\u2019 columnist David French that criticized inflammatory MAGA rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Walsh and other right-wing commentators, along with comedian Ben Bankas<\/a>, underscored Good\u2019s sexuality<\/a> to further demean her.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s different for men<\/h6>\n

Men have been treated differently in both press coverage and political response. Reeb, a father of four, never faced the level of condemnation heaped on Liuzzo. Southern white segregationists certainly questioned the motives of the many clergy members<\/a> who descended on Selma. Those sentiments, however, did not circulate much outside of segregationist press. Reeb\u2019s status as a minister, along with being a white man, may have shielded his reputation.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where there are some similarities to the response to Pretti\u2019s death. Initially, Trump administration officials brought out the same playbook they\u2019d used with Good. Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, called Pretti a domestic terrorist<\/a>. Greg Bovino, the leader of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, along with a Homeland Security spokeswoman, claimed Pretti intended to \u201cmassacre law enforcement<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such charges quickly unraveled as media outlets questioned them<\/a>. It helped that the video footage of Pretti\u2019s killing<\/a> was clearer than that of Good\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Like Good, Pretti became the target of vitriol in far-right media platforms<\/a>. But little of that has gotten much purchase in mainstream media, just as the segregationist contempt for activist clergy members in Selma was not amplified.<\/p>\n

Pretti\u2019s status as a licensed gun owner<\/a> who was exercising his Second Amendment<\/a> right to bear arms, as well as his First Amendment rights to protest, may also have assisted his posthumous reputation. Right-wing critics who condemned a lesbian<\/a> who was not adhering to a set of standards regarding femininity had a much harder time condemning a man licensed to carry<\/a> a gun.<\/p>\n

Liuzzo, Reeb, Good and Pretti all put their bodies on the line and made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable nonwhite people. Liuzzo and Good suffered significant character assassination that their male partners-in-protest avoided.<\/p>\n

Whiteness may help bring massive media attention, but being a dead white woman doesn\u2019t necessarily bring respectful treatment. For some, especially those who put their bodies on the line for nonwhite communities, they are just \u201cAWFL<\/a>,\u201d the current right-wing acronym for \u201caffluent, white, liberal women\u201d who step out of bounds.\"The<\/p>\n

Aniko Bodroghkozy<\/a>, Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When civil rights protesters are killed, some deaths \u2013 generally those of white people \u2013 resonate\u00a0more Posters memorialize Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two white Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents. AP Photo\/Ryan Murphy Aniko Bodroghkozy, University of Virginia Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two white Minneapolis residents killed in January 2026 by federal agents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[331,1191,537,648,39],"class_list":["post-4508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction","tag-gender","tag-minneapolics","tag-political-activism","tag-protests","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4509,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4508\/revisions\/4509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}