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July 15 - July 20, 2020
That Monte—Patrisse’s brother—is shot with rubber bullets and charged with terrorism as a routine police response to a manic episode reveals how readily the charge of terrorism is deployed within white supremacist institutions.
It is Patrisse herself, and her co-workers and comrades—including Alicia, Opal, and the other organizers and activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter network and movement—whose commitments and achievements are maligned with the label of terrorism. No white supremacist purveyor of violence has ever, to my knowledge, been labeled a terrorist by the state. Neither the slayers of Emmett Till nor the Ku Klux Klan bombers who extinguished the lives of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins before they could emerge from girlhood were ever charged with terrorism
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The very title, When They Call You a Terrorist, asks the reader to engage critically with the rhetoric of terrorism—not only, for example, the way in which it has occasioned and justified a global surge in Islamaphobia, and how it has impeded thoughtful reflection on the continued occupation of Palestine, but also how this rhetoric attempts to discredit anti-racist movements in the United States.
No jury, no trial. No patience like the patience shown the killers who gunned down nine worshippers in Charleston, or moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.
We will only know for sure that the single organization to which he ever belonged was the U.S. Army.
We will remember that most of the cops who are killed in this nation are killed by white men who are taken alive.
The extraordinary presence of police in our communities, a result of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using or selling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensured that we all knew this. 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.
That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.
I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.
And, unlike our counterparts on Wall Street, where crack is used and sold more, we don’t have an employee assistance plan.
A white man got Grandma Vina, and she was very young, he says. She couldn’t raise them girls. That’s all I know, he says, and we never speak of it again. No one does. These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.
He talks about healing and he talks about our right to it. As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.
As I attended these meetings over the years and after I spent time working as an adult counselor myself, I wondered: Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.
this is a nation founded on addiction—the production of rum and other alcohols, tobacco, sugar. And now, she will say, they put people in prison for it. Prison was not always the response to drug use, she will say to a me who is grown and able to process what became of a man I loved.
Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines. And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding.
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You do not have words to explain any of this, the full measure of the loss. Do words even exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures that approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like? This is why you tuck it away quietly in secret pockets. This is why you act like you are fine. This is why you go to school and pretend that algebraic equations that never add up to your father coming home make some kind of sense. This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
We don’t know what else to do and, besides, doesn’t Monte have a right to his inconsistent space? He never knows how the world will greet him, after all.
Have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up, Patrisse? It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am. Have I ever known such a moment in my own home? My mother is gone before 6:00 in the morning each day and home after 10:00 at night. This is our life. This has always been our life. And while we live and we love and we laugh, there is also an unmitigated and unmitigating arc of pain that is there, has
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He is the very same man who allowed my family to subsist without a working refrigerator for the better part of a year. The coincidence is so shocking to me. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I think if I say something, someone would think I was making it up, eating a big meal with a friend whose sweet father doesn’t care that my family has no way to do the same.
A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang. And it was mostly boys rounded up in those years. Boys, the initial wide swath of collateral damage in the war on gangs, the war on drugs, both of these names code for round up all the niggers you can.
the mass incarceration of first our fathers and later our mothers made our lives entirely unsafe. There were almost no adults who were there, present to love and nurture and defend and protect us. There was almost no one to say our dreams and our lives and our hopes mattered. And so we did it ourselves, the best way we knew how. This, more than anything, was the evolution of gangs in Van Nuys.
the hoisting of responsibility on the narrow, non-voting shoulders (and after too many busts, never-voting shoulders) of 13 year olds, 14, 15 and 16 year olds, thereby absolving grown people of any responsibility themselves.
As soon as you said drugs, as soon as you said gangs, you didn’t have to talk about what it meant to throw a bunch of adolescents together in a community with no resources, no outlets, no art classes, no mentorship, no love but from their families who were being harmed, cut daily, themselves.
And it didn’t matter how poorly conceived and executed the gang statutes were, what with their siphoning off of millions and millions and millions of dollars into police departments and away from everything that any rational parent or adult knows a young person needs in order to succeed—good schools, creative outlets, arts and sports programs and space to just be still. But so ineffective were these laws that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activit...
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the sheriffs at the LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence. There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.
There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.
I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background. He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police. I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter. They refuse.
And my brother. My big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother, my brother who has rescued small animals and my brother who has never, never hurt another human being, drops to his knees and begins to cry. His hands are in the air. He is sobbing. Please don’t take me back. Please don’t take me back.
Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented with limited choices?
I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives. It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says.
a patchwork community brimming with possibility in a small LA apartment ruled by a tiny Creole woman with a fourth-grade education who survived Jim Crow hatred and vicious rapes and unconscionable poverty and brutal domestic violence so she could sit on the other side of it all and still know more than most who have had so much more than she ever did, that at the end of the day, from love we come. To love we must return.
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?
It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father’s heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable? What is the impact of not being valued? How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not
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Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. LUCILLE CLIFTON
Whatever was going to happen would happen because of us, the family, and our capacity to manage severe mental illness. We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police.
If you have government housing benefits you cannot have anyone living with you if they’ve been convicted of a crime. Even if they are a juvenile. And even if they are incapable of caring for themselves because of an illness. And even if they cannot get a job because even the most low-level jobs won’t hire someone with a conviction. 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.
We thought he was on PCP or something, one says. He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness. He’s huge! one exclaims. Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them. We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother. I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white
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my brother has never hurt another living being, let alone a cop. But he has been stripped, beaten and starved, kicked and humiliated by cops. So they get to call him the threat. They get to call him the harm. They get to charge him with terrorism.
How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization?
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? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinary of emotion: rage, grief or guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?
From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.
while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity. It is designed to destroy a sense of community and eliminate leaders and create a climate of fear.
Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.
Black children taught by white teachers were particularly at risk for suspension, the data showed again and again. (Although the reverse was not true. Black teachers did not move to suspend white children at higher rates.)
Our vision was to interrupt the process that had led the young men to see themselves outside of their own dreams.
I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just needed to pay the rent.
I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school—all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?
Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase “collateral damage,” the use of which was ratcheted up in the 90s so they didn’t have to say dead Iraqi children.
In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx. Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police. Who is protected? Who is served?
there are no stats to track collateral deaths, the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that becomes cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke. Slow deaths. Undocumented deaths. 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.
