In August 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers in an earthen dam on a farm outside Philadelphia, Miss., following their disappearance a month and a half before. The slaying of civil rights activists was not unusual in Mississippi.Its white population had lynched more Black people than any other state. Black activists trying to register Black voters were routinely brutalized and killed. Medgar Evers, the NAACP Mississippi field secretary, was assassinated on his front steps the year before, and no one had been brought to justice.
But this was different. One of the slain civil rights activists, James Chaney, was Black. But the other two, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were white. The national response reflected that. The F.B.I. operated no central office in Mississippi, as it did in many other Southern states, yet more than 150 agents from outside the state swarmed the Delta looking for the missing men. Northern newspapers sent contingents of journalists, and all the major networks covered the story, with Walter Cronkite calling it “the focus of the whole country’s concern.” President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Schwerner’s and Goodman’s parents
The response to the deaths confirmed a cold calculus made by Mississippi’s civil rights strategists when they decided to recruit elite white college students and young professionals to help in the struggle to democratize the state: In America, white lives matter.
But in daring to risk their lives and fight on the side of Black Americans against racial apartheid, Goodman and Schwerner crossed a deadly line. To white supremacists, they were race traitors. And throughout American history, race traitors not only lose the protections of whiteness, but also often become the targets of a particular type of violence, one designed to warn other white people against the costs of fighting — and therefore, delegitimizing — white hegemony.
Last month, Renee Good and Alex Pretti joined this long but seldom spoken-of American tradition when they were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis while standing up for people of color ensnared in the Trump administration’s racialized deportation campaign.
While Trump officials moved to sully their reputations, Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who in 2022 dined with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, characterized the pair as betraying their whiteness by standing up for immigrants of color. “We are outnumbered by nonwhites,” he said on his livestreaming show. “And you feel bad about this race traitor? That’s what they are. You feel bad about this lesbian poet and Alex Pretti, the male nurse? You feel sorry for these race traitors that laid down their life in defense of this scheme?”
America’s racial caste system, which places white people on top, has existed since before the country was founded. And yet there have always been white people who have worked against and betrayed notions of racial hierarchy, rejecting the fictions that undergird them and the illegitimate power that racial caste justifies. These people are perhaps the most powerful weapon against these systems.
That’s why, like so many of the archetypal race traitors before them, the willingness of Good and Pretti to put themselves in danger for the cause of racial justice proved an unparalleled galvanizing force, one that simultaneously affirms the best about America, and the worst.
