The Dead Cannot Correct Them: Grief, Repressions, and Life in the US

By: Amber Butts

There’s always a reason the dead had to die.

This country is very practiced at explaining itself, searching the dead for a reason before it admits to killing them, rifling through whatever they left behind.

Alex Pretti was thirty-seven years old, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis protesting federal immigration raids when federal agents killed him. Officials said Alex drew a gun, though the videos showed a phone in his hand and the gun that he was legally carrying never left its holster. Two federal agents fired ten shots. His family learned he was dead from the television, watching a stranger share what happened to Alex before his parents were even notified.

Alex’s parents  wrote that Alex was a healer, a nurse who spent years sitting beside strangers at the edge of death trying to keep them here a little longer. They asked people to remember the life he lived instead of the version already circulating through government briefings. 

It is a cruel thing to be grieving someone the government killed while also having to defend their humanity against the monster or combatant it has turned them into. Families have to pull the person they loved back from the state’s version of them. No family should have to spend the first hours of grief convincing the rest of us that the person they loved was fully human.

A few weeks earlier, Renée Good dropped her child off at school before an ICE officer killed her. I get caught on the school drop-off because I know that morning. I do it often enough that I can picture the whole thing without trying. The officer fired three shots in less than a second. Her final words to him were “I’m not mad at you.” His final words after shooting her three times were “fucking bitch.”

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The state has thousands of channels for one lie, and sometimes the only thing standing against all of them is community journalism and people willing to risk arrest for lawfully documenting police misconduct.

Black people know this move too well. We have watched our dead blamed for their own murders for generations. And we understand what it means when the government starts killing white people in public. The violence has moved beyond the people this country has organized its violence around.

That does not make those deaths more important, but it exposes the scale of the repression, because Black communities have repeatedly been the place officials test what they can get away with before using those methods elsewhere. The US can live with this violence when it is aimed at us. There is a particular bitterness in watching the country recognize danger only after it reaches people it was never supposed to reach.

Crossing that line has taught some white people that whiteness has limits, a fact written into the history of white people killed for putting themselves in front of anti-Black violence. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer to help Black organizers register voters and build Freedom Schools, and were murdered with James Chaney after investigating the burning of a Black church. Viola Liuzzo went to Alabama after Bloody Sunday, drove movement workers between Selma and Montgomery, and was murdered by Klansmen while transporting Leroy Moton, a Black civil rights worker. Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville after a white supremacist drove his car into people protesting the Unite the Right rally. White supremacy can tolerate disapproval, but white people who obstruct its violence can become fair game too.

Whiteness may fail to keep a white person alive, but death does not strip it of its value. The country still knows whose killing should trouble its supposed conscience, even when the violence that killed them has been practiced on Black people without producing the same alarm. Once someone is dead, what they believed can be dragged into the defense of their killing, their refusal to comply treated like evidence that the violence was inevitable. Black people know that cruelty well because we have been told for generations that our dead should have known better, should have obeyed, should have somehow fucking survived their own murder.

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Toni Morrison said, ‘I insist on being shocked.’ I need that insistence because repeated exposure to state violence can make horror ordinary. I resist that adjustment and refuse to let repetition decide what no longer deserves shock.

I don’t trust how fast my body tries to move on. I make myself go back to it, to them, but it won’t stay. It thins out while I’m there. Some days I scroll away, let something softer take my attention, and I know what I’m doing.

We were never meant to absorb this much suffering at this speed, and still, it is happening. The responsibility is not to feel everything, but to refuse numbness as a political condition and find ways to keep paying attention without destroying ourselves. Attention should leave us more available to each other, not merely more informed.

The families wake the next morning to a hole in the world, and the people who made it get dressed for work. Alex’s parents learned about the hole from the television. Renée’s children had a mother that morning, and by afternoon they didn’t.

The dead cannot correct the account. They cannot argue with the government that killed them or wrest their final minutes back from strangers. But the people who knew them, loved them, fought with them, disappointed them, forgave them, and remember the life beyond those final moments become the keepers, the guardians of their stories. We must always turn to them to tell the story true, to hold the archives of our dead, to defend them through grief, because the state will strengthen itself on every lie left uncontested.

This is the work of the living.

Amber Butts is a Black mama, abolitionist, and advocate for collective freedom and self-determination. Rooted in Oakland, she moves through worlds of play and repair, treating tenderness, nuance, and joy as abolitionist strategies of survival and transformation. Her role as an organizer is guided by expansive, nuanced visions of Blackness that refuse constriction and one-dimensionality. Her work—through cultural strategy, storytelling, and grief practice—carries forward traditions of mutual aid, imagination, and struggle across generations. Amber’s favorite freedom practice is observing how non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another, lessons that shape her abolitionist commitments and her vision for interdependent futures.