When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
from “Healing Self, Others, the World,” Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 24 August, 2023
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, with a foreword by Angela Y. Davis came out in 2017 –
before the pandemic, but straight out of the Trump Administration’s misogynist white supremacism and the roiling fierceness of the global BLM response to the administration’s flagrant support of militarist police brutality. Born in 1983, Gen-Xs’ Khan-Cullors almost picks up where Lazard’s life enters the “Roots” “cultural rewiring” of the “Say it loud, “I’m Black and I’m proud!”” movements of her teen years and young adulthood from the mid-1970s into the early Ronald Reagan years of the 80s.
Nixon was out, Vietnam carnage pulled back and the Voting Rights Act moved forward; but a wave of conservative legislation, “talk radio” aggressive rhetoric, rogue and regimented law enforcement personnel, surveillance systems, land and property “redevelopment” and drugs flowed (back) into Black neighborhoods and American courtrooms, lashing back at long-awaited and newfound liberties, ridiculing and demonizing homegrown leaders and undermining neighborhood solidarity (much like what’s going on today).
The overlap of BOTH of these women’s brothers being violently targeted and bullied, starting AS CHILDREN, by police; later harassed, imprisoned and terrorized for nonviolent drug/property crimes brought on by addiction, poverty, prejudice, joblessness and the “school-to-prison pipeline” is absolutely heartbreaking.
Lazard and Khan-Cullors’ life stories and their vivid examples and descriptions made not only the rise of hip-hop and rap music during that era much more understandable to me as a raised-white suburban teen and young adult bathed in the earlier Rhythm & Blues in the 60s Marvin Gaye asking “What’s Goin’ On?” in the 70s.
They also clarified sources for the volcanic suppressed rage erupting worldwide post 9/11, to the War on Iraq/ “Weapons of Mass Destruction” folly and decades-long anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudice that culminated with the exposure of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown/Ferguson, George Perry Floyd and many others’ murders followed by their killers acquittals or minimum sentencing that sent shock waves through us all over and over in the 2000s.
The police and hyper-militarized ICE “law enforcement” and vigilantes really WERE (and are) going around harassing individuals, families; targeting neighborhoods and killing people under the guise of “self-defense” and “law and order;” fueled by white supremacist, misogynist-dominated 1% corporate authoritarians buying out and propagandizing ultra-conservative, communist and formerly “democratic” politicians and regimes alike.
“Business as usual?” There was no more hiding racism behind Rush Limbaugh and FOX news by 2012-13; it was right there on PBS, global social media and Democracy Now!, just like the Asian peasant civilian casualties’ “collateral damage” had been televised to Lazard and her family on Walter Cronkite 47 years before.
Khan-Cullors and bandele are so succinct, so direct, so well-informed, so passionate; they really ratchet up the stakes tenfold, if not more. Did you know “In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated?”
“BETWEEN 1982 AND 2000, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE LOCKED UP IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA GROWS BY 500 PERCENT… (my caps, wc) A generation of human beings…having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners… And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding. Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands…Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks.” !!!! “And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it’s locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time.”
If and when one is released, there is “no infrastructure that existed to help secure either …re-entry or mental health.” “In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence, but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.”
She’s read James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and Malcolm X WAY before she’s graduated from high school. A generation after Lazard’s brother was in prison outside Chicago in 1974 for minor “gang-related” activities, Khan-Cullors’ brother Monte was tortured and beaten in prison in 2006; accused of a “third strike” for offenses he committed during a fender-bender traffic stop, manic episode or did not commit at all.
He could have gotten life in prison. He was 28 years old. He appeared in court incapacitated, strapped to a gurney, face covered by a spit-guard, “in a full psychotic break,” unable to say anything except to call out “MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” when he groggily perceives his Mother is there.
“Here is all of our family’s pain on full blast before people who hate us.” Khan-Cullors goes to work, she’s learned “walk-on-water faith” “lessons from the Strategy Center about how to organize in the face of overwhelming odds,” does pre-crowd-sourcing family, friend and neighbor fundraising to get a retainer to replace her brother’s wimpy, ill-informed Public Defender with an attorney that is willing and able get one of his “strikes” expunged.
“I refuse to be intimidated.” RIGHT ON!
She has huge empathy and support for her parents, family, co-workers and neighbors. Her Mother can only say “I feel so guilty,” but Khan-Cullors responds, “What did she ever do except love us and work for us, two, three jobs at a time, and worship and follow rules, while her own (Jehovah’s Witness) family turned its back on her?...Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them?”
Wealthy white boys STILL avoid arrest, family trauma and stay out of jail far more than Black, Latinx and Native Americans do, even though they deal as much or more drugs, commit as many rapes, assaults and petty property and traffic offenses. As they have for decades, centuries.
“We live between Twin Towers of Poverty and the Police,” Khan-Cullors says.
“What is the impact of not being valued?
How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?
My father was part of a generation of Black men who spent a lifetime watching hope and dreams shoved just out of their reach until it seemed normal, the way it just was. I lost my father at a time when 2.2 million people had gone missing on our watch, buried in prisons that were buried in small towns, but somehow and unbelievably this man kept coming back.
He kept coming back.
He kept coming back.”
When Monte gets out of prison, does well for a while and then trashes his girlfriend’s house in another manic episode; Khan-Cullors gathers their older brother, her husband and other friends, finally talking Monte into voluntarily going in to the hospital for treatment.
“We have navigated this situation with no police involvement…this is what community control looks like…
This is what the love of Black men looks like.
This is what our Black yesterday once looked like.
And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.”
This happened seven years BEFORE George Zimmerman is acquitted of all charges in Trayvon Martin’s murder and protests erupt.
Anti-racist Facebook friend Alicia Garza writes to her, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter… I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER.”
Khan-Cullors writes back with a hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. They start working with Opal Tometi, organizer for Black Alliance for Just Immigration she says, “we are going to begin organizing.” and
“I write: I hope it impacts more than we can ever imagine.”
YES, YES, YES Patrisse, Alicia and Opal. It certainly does… YOU CERTAINLY DID! Thank you!
P. S. “We call our organization Dignity and Power Now.
And in 2016 we establish the first civilian oversight board of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.”
(Foreword)
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2017) St. Martin’s Publishing Group, New York, NY. ()
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriss... () June 20, 1983 (age 43) Los Angeles.
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