Renee Nicole Good and Keith Porter - Whose Grief Gets Seen

By Mike Lowery

A mother is dead.

A woman, a daughter, a friend, a human being is gone, and no amount of money will ever bring her back.

The outpouring of support for Renée Nicole Good’s family moves me deeply.

That money will help with funeral costs, with stability, with some small measure of comfort in the middle of unimaginable pain.

It is a beautiful thing to see community show up for a grieving family like that.

But there is another family, another grave, another circle of friends trying to breathe through the same kind of nightmare.

His name is Keith Porter.

He was also killed by an ICE agent.

He was Black.

And the response to his death looks very different.

Same agency.

Same kind of violence.

Same kind of loss.

Two human beings killed days apart.

One family sees donations soar into the hundreds of thousands and beyond.

The other is still struggling to get people to even see what happened.

This is what racial disparity looks like in real time.

It is not just slurs or extremists in white hoods.

It is who gets humanized and who gets framed as a threat.

It is whose GoFundMe we rush to share and whose name we let sink quietly out of the feed.

It is which story we instinctively call “a tragedy” and which one we quietly file away as “complicated.”

Most of the people donating to these campaigns are not sitting at home thinking, “Black lives don’t matter.”

They are seeing what the media and their social feeds put in front of them.

They are reacting to the way these stories are framed, to which faces are described as “beloved mother” and which are introduced with words like “armed,” “suspect,” or “possible threat.”

That is how structural racism works.

Nobody has to say the word “race” out loud for it to shape whose grief gets fully honored and whose is minimized or ignored.

So this is not a plea to stop giving to the Goodman family.

They deserve every dollar, every prayer, every candle at every vigil.

This is a plea to widen that same compassion to Keith Porter’s family and to every Black family walking through the same hell with a fraction of the empathy and support.

Two families.

Two funerals.

Two communities shattered.

The value of their loved ones is not and never has been measured in dollars raised.

If you are reading this and you feel even a little uncomfortable, sit with that.

Ask yourself why one story reached you and the other did not.

Ask yourself whose humanity you are being trained to see first, and whose you are being trained to doubt.

I am not here to shame anyone.

I am here to shine a little light in a dark corner.

Remember Renée Nicole Good.

Remember Keith Porter.

And if you believe that every life has equal worth, then let your actions, your voice, your shares, and your donations reflect that—especially when the algorithms and the headlines do not. Inform your friends . They might not even know.

Deuces