The United States of Necropolitics

By: Lillian Green

Exploration of the dynamics of political mobilization in response to death. 

Over the past two months, we have witnessed multiple instances of state-sanctioned violence by the United States that have resulted in the death of multiple U.S. Citizens and the injury of countless others. One of the most notable being the murder of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of 3 and a Minnesota resident. Renee was a poet, wife, daughter, and valued community member. She was murdered by an ICE agent on January 7th, 2026. 

With the current administration rushing to slander Rennee and justify her murder just hours after she was denied aid from physicians on the scene, the nation has been moved into action these past months. Protests have been blossoming in almost every state, with outcries from communities that are tired of the United States’ continued abuse of its people.  

This mobilization brings up interesting conversations on the state of necropolitics in the United States and how our culture responds to death. Necropolitics, a theorization originally coined by  Achille Mbembe, works to explain how governing bodies systematically decide who lives or dies, and ultimately whose life is deemed important and whose death is deemed necessary.  A world where vulnerable populations and minority groups are forced to move through society as the “living dead” with their mortality in the hands of the State.  

While the mobilization we’ve seen in response to the gruesome murder of Renee Good is a great thing, it begs the question: where was this mobilization for the countless people who have died at the hands of ICE before Renee? 

This piece is in no way attempting to minimize the horror of Rennee Good’s death, nor to say that the outrage in response was not warranted. Instead, I would like to start a conversation on why we are conditioned to respond to death in the United States the way we are, and how that influences our politic.

The idea that the state gets to decide whose life is valuable should not be a shocking one. From the countless genocides carried out by the  United States both domestically and internationally, to our capitalistic system that forces people to face violence through poverty, our country is no stranger to state-sanctioned violence. The United States, which is built on capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism, inherently places less value on the lives of people of color, women, disabled people, and the LGBTQ+ community. Necropolitics provides us a critical framework for understanding that the violence perpetuated towards these groups, which often results in death, is no mistake or coincidence, but by design. 

In the case of recent events, however, we have seen a subversion of the necropolitics that the U.S. usually practices. This time, the person facing violence was a middle-class white woman who was also a US citizen, and because of this subversion, we have also seen a change in the response usually garnered by incidents like this one. 

For example, on New Year's Eve, only seven days before Renee Good’s death, a Black Man, Keith Porter Jr, was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in his front yard. Keith Porter was a 43-year-old father of two and a California resident.  It was only after the outcry over Renee’s death that Keith’s name and story caught any attention. However, there was not nearly as much attention as what came from the mobilization that Renee spurred. Similarly, according to The Guardian (2026), there have been 32 deaths in ICE custody since the implementation of the Trump administration's immigration policies this past year–yet who is yelling their names? 

The differences in mobilization can be explained by a lecture that I had the opportunity to attend at Spelman in November, hosted by Dr. Shatema Threadcraft, titled “Black Femicide & Morrisonian Democracy.” During this lecture, Dr. Threadcraft explores the idea of “spectacular” and “unspectacular” death when explaining why people are more likely to mobilize in response to Black male death, which is seen as “spectacular” in comparison to Black female death. Her idea is that not all deaths are created equal. because of societal views on who has the most value. Dr. Threadcraft references necropolitics as a framework within her own work and exploration into how the death of Black women is often overlooked. 

People with marginalized identities have been dying at the hands of the United States since its creation, and now at the hands of one of its vessels, ICE. Yet, the people who are killed the most often are people of color who are often not U.S. citizens, making their deaths in the eyes of the State expendable, and in the eyes of the people, too “unspectacular” to warrant outrage, attention, or political mobilization. These deaths are seen not even as numbers, as people stop caring, and therefore stop counting and remembering the lives that have been lost long before January 7th. 

Necropolitics practiced by the State can be a meaningful reflection of the morals of the people and broader society. Just like how our government places less value on the lives of marginalized people, making their deaths unspectacular, we, in turn, adopt a culture of apathy towards the deaths of those same people. While some of this can be attributed to things like desensitization as a result of the sheer amount of violence our world is filled with, I believe it is deeply rooted in how we are programmed to understand death in the United States. 
The framework of necropolitics can be seen in even the smallest ways we interact with death in relation to political mobilization–the informational and awareness posts on genocides across the globe we decide to swipe past versus the ones we don't. The calls to action we repost, the stories we decide are worth listening to. These are all informed by whose lives, or more importantly, whose deaths, we view as spectacular. Even the hopelessness we feel in response to certain violence can be a symptom of the way the U.S. practices necropolitics as it normalizes the death of certain groups and frames their deaths as a necessity or inevitability, further creating the culture of apathy I referred too previously, where we feel so hopeless we instead choose numbeness, conceding to the State’s ideas of whose deaths deserve attention and moblization. 

For many, Renee’s murder was a wake-up call, or even a “break in the matrix” where people were snapped out of the trance of apathy, because of this disruption in the current pattern of ICE victims. They saw someone whose life is supposed to matter be killed senselessly, in the same way people of color have suffered in this country forever. This shocking, “spectacular” death in a sea of “unspectacular” loss motivated a type of political mobilization that has been missing this past year.

However, this should not be what it took in order for people to wake up.

This observation isn't meant to demonize individuals based on what Instagram reel they share or TikTok they repost, but instead it is a call to reflect on how the state of American necropolitics has influenced the ways you react to death, and practice activism in response to it. I believe that if more of this reflection is done, we can begin to unlearn the ways that we have been conditioned to look at death. If we can tap into radical empathy and dispel notions of some deaths being more spectacular than others, we can practice activism that leads to change much more effectively and create a moment where we center all the people the State has killed, and not only the ones most palatable to our society. 

We can not forget:

Genry Ruiz Guillén

Serawit Gezahegn Dejene

Maksym Chernyak

Juan Alexis Tineo-Martine

Brayan Garzón-Rayo

Nhon Ngoc Nguyen

Marie Ange Blaise

Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado

Jesus Molina-Veya

Johnny Noviello 

Isidro Pérez

Tien Xuan Phan

Chaofeng Ge

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas

Oscar Rascon Duarte

Santos Banegas Reyes

Ismael Ayala-Uribe

Norlan Guzman-Fuentes

Miguel Ángel García Medin

Huabing Xie, of China

Leo Cruz-Silva

Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh

Josué Castro Rivera

Gabriel Garcia Aviles

Kai Yin Wong

Francisco Gaspar-Andrés

Pete Sumalo Montejo

Shiraz Fatehali Sachwan

Jean Wilson Brutus

Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir

Delvin Francisco Rodriguez

Nenko Stanev Gantchev