When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

This was a tough read. Cullors is one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matters movement. She describes in stark and graphic detail how she came to that point, what happened to her brother, as she was growing up, and to her father. And to so many others in her community in California. How the police could and would target young Black boys and men, for the mere fact that they were black and therefore, vulnerable. How can people live in such a constant state of anxiety and fear, and hope to be healthy? It reminded me of what we read about during the Civil Rights era and before; the brutality, and the hatred and discrimination. It reminds me of what refugees fleeing horrific conditions in their former homelands must feel every day they show more are on the run, and sometimes, maybe often, when they arrive in a new place and try to begin again. It reminds me of what the lives of Jews and other minorities must have been in the time of Nazi Germany. That kind of hatred and discrimination was the law of the land then. It isn't, now, but it is very much an unwritten law, in some places. Many places, as it turns out.

The treatment of the mentally ill, the imprisonment of men and boys and their treatment in the jail system, for seemingly minor infractions (treatment that would never be tolerated for whites), made me sick to read about. I applaud Cullors for exposing the truth and for being brave enough to devote her life to trying to remedy what to me just sees so hopeless a situation. It's so much larger than one person or even a group of people, can *fix*. Sadly, Canada is not exempt from this problem. I hope and believe that it is not as rampant here as it is in the States, but we can't pat ourselves on the backs at all, as this is a very current problem here, as well.

I would be in a constant state of fear and anxiety and tension if I had to live like that. It makes me feel so hopeless that things will change, despite the best intentions of a few. It also fills me with rage that humans treat one another this way. Why??

Edited to add a quote by Cullors, talking about "the anxiety that is there while waiting for the next crisis to unfold". It is ALWAYS there.

This is such an important book. I think it ought to be compulsory reading for so many: social workers, social justice workers, police, lawyers, educators, politicians, and just so many more show less

There's a lot of misinformation floating around about the Black Lives Matter movement, some of it clearly intended to discredit their push to hold law enforcement accountable and to draw attention to serious issues, but also some based on inadequate reporting and system bias. When They Call You a Terrorist is a memoir by one of the three women who founded Black Lives Matters and her account of her own life, as well as of the beginning months of Black Lives Matter is a good start to learning about what is really happening.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors grew up in Van Nuys, California, a part of greater Los Angeles inhabited by low income and middle class Hispanic and black people. The father who was around during her childhood had had a good job show more at an auto manufacturing plant, a job which gave him both a solid paycheck and a sense of pride. When the plant closed, the only work he could find was intermittent and badly paid, which put strain on his family and he eventually left. When They Call You a Terrorist is both starkly honest and clear in depicting how policies and events had direct impact on her family -- here showing how changes in manufacturing hurt not just white people, but also other members of the working class. Throughout the book, Khan-Cullors shows through incidents that shaped her own life, how mental illness is treated when the person suffering is a young black man of limited means, how the policing of young black boys is harmful, how housing policy hurts families, how hard it is to navigate life as both a black woman and as a queer woman and how a person raised in this environment can nonetheless rise into becoming a community activist and how important that role is.

I learned quite a bit from this book, but I also enjoyed reading about Khan-Cullors herself and how her life shaped who she is today. show less

Part memoir, part social science, part history, and part activism, When They Call You A Terrorist is personal, informative, and galvanizing - certainly a must-read for our time.

Quotes

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be...black, but by getting the public to associate the...blacks with heroin...and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities...Did we know we were lying? Of course we did." -John Ehrlichman, Nixon's National Domestic Policy Chief (9) [See quote source: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-b...

[Re: police presence in the neighborhood] I do not understand...what role they play in the neighborhood. They do not speak to us or help guide us across show more streets. They are never friendly. It is clear not only that they are not our friends, but that they do not like us very much. [Describing an incident where her brothers and their friends are roughed up by police for standing and talking in an alleyway.] ...there are no green spaces, no community centers to shoot hoops in, no playgrounds with handball courts, no parks for children to build castles in, so they make the alleyway their secret place and go there to discuss things...
[Afterward] They will be silent in the way we often hear of the silence of rape victims. (14-15)

For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory. (26)

...having attended schools with both Black and white girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished similarly. (26-27)

We suspect that things are not supposed to be this way but we aren't sure what the other way is. (53)

Surges in Americans' preferred drugs of choice seem to always align with what is available in the region our nation is invading. (92)

We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?
That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. (97)

We have conversation after conversation about how racism makes us hate ourselves and misdirects our anger toward one another rather than focusing it on where the sources of the problem lie. We talk about how dangerous media and pop culture can be, how complicit they are in shaping how we move in the world. (140)

Where we could see that other laws were raced-based and aimed at disrupting Black life, we had - we still have - a hard time accepting drug policy as race policy and the war on drugs as the legal response to the gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements....Instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, [America] made us the harm. (144)

[Example of captions on two Getty images post-Katrina: white people "finding" food, black people "looting"] (144)

Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain't worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable. (187)

...how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? (194)

Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human. (Re: Black Lives Matter, 205)

[In Ferguson] All this money put in to suppress a community. We'd need far less to ensure it thrived. Where are the politicians who are doing that? (213)

See also: Pushout (Morris), The New Jim Crow (Alexander), I Can't Breathe (Taibbi) show less

Here's an unusual political memoir - there's much more about the childhood of author Khan-Cullors than there is about the essential group she co-founded: Black Lives Matter. Patrisse grew up in Van Nuys, CA, a predominantly black and Mexican community. Her heroic mother worked double shifts constantly to care for her four children (one of whom suffers from mental illness and is tortured in jail), without financial support from the fathers of the children. Patrisse becomes aware of her own father Gabriel, who was not the dad she grew up knowing, not the same dad of her brothers and sister. She is happily enveloped by Gabriel and the warmth and acceptance of her Louisiana-rooted relatives. Lucky enough to attend a progressive school out show more of her neighborhood, Patrisse broadens her life experience, meeting and aligning herself with fellow social justice warriors. She moves into St. Elmo's Village, an artist's colony in Central LA, but has to leave when the police conduct constant incursions based on "fitting the description" raids. Even before Black Lives Matter, Patrisse helps to found organizations such as The Strategy Center, Dignity and Power Now, and Dream Defenders, recognizing the role of incarceration in the lives of all the males in her ambit. She's the quintessential community organizer whose brush broadens to encompass the world. Patrisse tells a blunt, heartening story that's just getting started.

Quotes: "How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylan Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Ted Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine?"

"[Re:Ferguson, post Michael Brown's murder] All the money put in to suppress a community. We'd need far less to ensure it thrived." show less

While my expectation was that this book would focus mostly on the genesis and progress of the Black Lives Matter movement, co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors offers up something richer and even more powerful, her life story leading up to the creation of the movement, and then key moments since #BLM came into existence. We learn about the conditions she grew up in and the challenges she and her family were forced to face and overcome in Southern L.A.. We are reminded that racism is as institutional as it is personal. Particularly disturbing is the story of her brother, who battled schizophrenic disorder and was often criminalized on the basis of his condition, rather than being provided access to the help needed to battle his disease.

When show more George Zimmerman is found not guilty for the unconscionable murder of Trayvon Martin, Khan-Cullors and a dedicated group of Women of Color create the BLM movement. Though they are demonized by the conservative media for speaking out and marching, they continue their efforts to shine a light on injustices toward the African-American community.

I'll sound like a cliche here, but this is truly a book that all white Americans should read. If your interpretation of life in Black America is formed by what you see on Fox News (or even CNN for that matter), Khan-Cullors takes you closer to the realities of the bleak truth, where you live looking over your shoulder, and are all-too-often presumed guilty on the basis of your skin color. This, and "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander truly should be required reading for all of us.

This is a personal story of courage and hope in the face of frequent hopelessness. Inspiring and, if incomplete, perhaps it is because the future truly is not yet written. It's up to us. show less

Best for: Those who enjoy deeply personal memoirs.

In a nutshell: Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors shares the story of her life so far, including her work as an activist, artist, and founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Worth quoting:
“For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children.”
“My father attended schools that did little more than train him to serve another man’s dreams, ensure another man’s wealth, produce another man’s vision.”
“What is the impact of not being valued?”
“No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control show more and kill us.”

Why I chose it: I enjoy memoirs, and I feel like I don’t know enough about the woman who started the Black Lives Matter movement.

Lollygagger’s Review:
At times over the past five years, it can seem that Black Lives Matter spontaneously erupted out of the anger at police violence against Black men, women and children. But BLM didn’t just appear from the ether; it was created by three Black women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi. These women have stories that deserve to be shared, and this book provides insight into the lives of one of these women.

The subheading “A Black Lives Matter Memoir” might suggest that there will be a heavy emphasis on the time in 2013 when the movement began. And that definitely gets coverage, but this book is more about Ms. Khan-Cullors’s life and how that leads to the movement. She shares so much of herself — her pain, her joy, her love, her anger. Some memoirs scratch the surface and present something that feels a bit false. Not here. Ms. Khan-Cullors is vulnerable, and poetic, and unapologetic. She describes experiences that no one should have to go through, making it clear that these experiences are not unique to her.

This book contains so much more than its 250 pages suggest. The writing is fantastic, in a style I am not used to. I’d almost call it flowery, but that implies the words are superfluous. It’s not that. It’s almost lyrical, poetic and times. Ms. Khan-Cullors (with co-author bandele) covers interactions with the police (her own interactions, and interactions her families and friends have), what it is like to have a parent in prison, what it is like to have a sibling with mental illness who is tortured by the prison system. What it is like to not be heard, and what it is like to find a way to fight back. show less

Although, like any book, there are critiques I could offer, I won't go there this time; this book demands respect.

Khan-Cullors tells her story, the story of an average black woman in America. Her brother is imprisoned, facing a life-sentence for mental health challenges, and he is refused treatment or care. Her father struggles with addiction throughout his life, to die at 52. Her mother works two jobs, but still can't afford to keep her children fed. And KC, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter—an organization simply aiming to evaluate the value of black life above zero—is called a terrorist.

The tone is anything but sensational; KC is simply telling her story. And that is what is so powerful about this book. Black people have been show more living in America as long as white people have. Supposedly, slavery ended over 150 years ago. And yet, for the average black person in America, every day is a war zone. They're just trying to survive. This is wrong, and it is up to all of us—especially the most privileged and those in power—to begin treating black people with the respect that their humanity deserves.

This book is not as heavy on statistics and analytical analysis as others on systemic black oppression (such as "The New Jim Crow"). But this is not a shortcoming. This book is accessible, and deeply human. show less