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

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

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 girl-hood were ever charged with terrorism or officially referred to as terrorists.

They preached it more than they preached about what it meant to be the world’s wealthiest nation and yet the place with extraordinary unemployment, an extraordinary lack of livable wages and an extraordinary disruption of basic opportunity.

We will remember that most of the cops who are killed in this nation are killed by white men who are taken alive.

We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.

The members of our movement are called terrorists. We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists.

Where we live is multiracial, although by far the majority of people are Mexican. But there are Korean people and Black people like us, and even one white woman who is morbidly obese and cannot bathe in the tub the apartments in our buildings provide. I watch her sneak down to the dilapidated swimming pool attached to our apartment building, the one I will learn to swim in. Each night when she thinks no one is looking, she bathes in the water, bath soap, washcloth, shampoo and all. She never knows I see her and I never say. Not only because she is an adult and I am a child. But because she is part of who makes us, us.

Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient, not a place where roots are meant to take hold, meant to grow into trees that live and live. The only place in my hood to buy groceries is a 7-Eleven. Without it, George’s liquor store, the small Mexican and Chinese fast-food spots and the Taco Bell we would have nowhere in our neighborhood to get something to eat or drink.

My own mother worked 16 hours a day, at two and sometimes three jobs. She never had a career, only labored to pull together enough to make ends meet. Telemarketer, receptionist, domestic support, office cleaner—these were the jobs my mom did and all were vital to us, especially after the Van Nuys GM plant shut down and our family’s stability did too, right along with it.

No police cars circle blocks or people in 90210, not like in Van Nuys, where they do all day, every day, like hungry hyenas out there on the flatlands. For a long time I see them, the police in their cars, but I do not understand them, what role they play in the neighborhood. They do not speak to us or help guide us across 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. I try to avoid them, but this is impossible, of course. They are omnipresent.

Even tiny Jasmine, probably five years old during that raid, was yelled at and told to sit on the couch with me as police tore through our home in a way I would never later see on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where Olivia Benson is always gentle with the kids. In real life, when I was a little kid, when my brothers and sisters were, we were treated like suspects.

Kids pour out of those vehicles, Mercedes and Lexuses, and run from waving parents onto the campus’s greener-than-green lawn, as all at once I become familiar with a sudden and new feeling taking root in my spirit: a shame that goes deep, that is encompassing and defining. I realize we are poor.

Gabriel tells me he lives in a home for sober adults. He tells me right away he’s in recovery from crack addiction. 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.

These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.

giving. 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.

It will be more than a decade before I meet the advocate and scholar Deborah Small, who will say that 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.

In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising. Monies were being spent unequally for schools. Our programs were cut. Our parents had the most meager of jobs. Our families were torn asunder. I begin to realize this when I am provided a basis for comparison.

It was the 1990s and what was mostly said—in carefully chosen language—was that being born Black or Mexican was enough to label you a gang member, a dangerous drug-involved criminal. And there were few leaders, save for perhaps Maxine Waters, saying that it was all bullshit. 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

There was no education plan for us—school budgets had been decimated and a decade before Reagan had declared ketchup was a vegetable so that’s what we were fed, we who counted on school breakfast and lunch to get through the day. With no education plan for us or thought about us becoming arbiters of our own destiny or self-determining contributors to an economy designed to reward only a few, the only plan left for us was prison or death.

Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us. And the propaganda, the rationalizing of how much we needed to be destroyed, we the generation called super-predators, was promoted by people who were Republican and Democrat, and, save for a few, Black as well as white. It was such convenient reasoning: 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.

It will be years, I will be grown, before she tells me what she saw, the child she bore, the one who loved animals and who once laughed easily, her big six-foot-two son, emaciated, more than 40 pounds gone from his suddenly frail frame. He is bruised and beaten. By who? My mother demands to know, but Monte won’t say. He is too scared to say. Years will pass before I learn that Monte was in a full-blown episode when he was taken to jail. He was hearing voices. His mind had been folded in on itself, and shaken brutally. The jail psychiatrist is the first to provide a diagnosis that explains why Monte has these mood swings, this erratic behavior: he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this.

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,

But at the turn of the century it is all Fuck you, faggot! and eyes filled with violence and disgust that follow us, that train themselves on us. But we stay together, even when Cheyenne drops out of school, as she eventually does. She lives far from Cleveland High School and has little support from her family when it comes to making it through high school. She has no advocates, no one to ensure she gets meals, let alone does her homework, or to navigate situations with teachers. And our schools are not set up to be surrogates for the poorest of children, which is to say Cheyenne, which is to say most of us.

One afternoon I listen to a young man speak in the group of 30 young people who identify as Queer. We are speaking about homophobia and the specific pain it causes, the deep depression it’s wrought. We talk about what it’s meant for so many of us to have been forced out of our homes by our parents. We talk about the rampant homelessness among us, the hunger, the isolation. And then this young brother says he doesn’t expect he has long to live. He tells us he is 18 and has been diagnosed HIV positive and with that there is a grief in the room that cannot be contained. We grieve for him and we grieve because if we weren’t aware of it before, now we cannot turn away: we live in a world where hatred is so deep that adults are fine ensuring death sentences for us young people who have done nothing but be in the world who we were born to be.

who is as fluid in Spanish as she is in English,

I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx and Lenin to my knowledge of hooks, Lorde and Walker. I focus on young people and produce spoken-word events. I canvass as part of their Bus Riders’ Union, a campaign that pushes back not only on climate change by highlighting the need to reduce reliance on cars, but also provides a workable and fair public transit system for people, like my mother, who rely on buses to get to work.

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.

Two months later my father is sentenced to three years in prison. He is able to avoid the seven-year bid because he volunteers to go to the prison fire camp, a program where convicts are made to serve as frontline first responders when the California wildfires break out. They are the ones who go in before trained firefighters do.

I go into his room and look around this tiny space that once was and now no longer is his, this place where he was reinventing himself. I begin packing up the few material items that proved he was here. My father was here. He existed. Gabriel Brignac. This single lockbox of important papers. These few pairs of shoes and items of clothing. They are not the sum of a man. But they are part of him. I pack them up.

What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm—hands behind your back, Nigger. Get on the fucking wall, Nigger! Lift your sac, Nigger. Don’t look at me like that or I will fucking kill your Black ass

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?

We tried pulling him closer to us, and my mother begged him to live with her, risking her Section 8 status. 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.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased. And then he was charged with terrorism. Literally. If someone alleges that you have said something threatening to them and causing them to fear for their life, you can be charged, as my brother, who was in a full manic episode, was charged, with terrorism.

And even those who have harmed others—what if there had been appropriate interventions, medical interventions, compassionate interventions, early on? What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgment, to one life mattering and another not? I am thinking of all the people, like my brother, like my father—who have been the targets of harm, not the harm itself.

From the Strategy Center I learned how to map a campaign with young Black and Brown people, and that we could actually win that campaign. Monte’s arrest came the year we won a fight against the school district for fining parents $250 each time their child was late to school—even if they were late because the lines to get through the metal detectors were unconscionably long.

There is rarely discussion about the trauma that often drives chaotic drug use and addiction. And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction. (For some drugs, like marijuana, fully 90 percent of those who use never become addicted.) They wake up, go to work or school, pay their taxes, raise their kids, make love with their partners. They live. They live regular old boring lives. But for my father, my brother, others I know, chaos was a factor before drugs were a part of their lives. Why does no one ever address that?

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

There’s a difference between abuse and torture. Both are horrible, often unbearable, and both leave scars. Neither can be minimized. But I make the distinction here in order to explain that 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. This is the definition used by the Center of Victims of Torture.

“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 city of Los Angeles, almost 50 percent of all homicides go unsolved and gang injunctions did absolutely nothing to stave off violence in the street. Protection wasn’t the goal no matter what anyone said. 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?

Cops were pushed, required, not only to stop people—read: Black people—for the most minor incidents not related to public safety but also to issue as many citations as possible. It became a game—who could issue the most? Each citation carried a fine, and those fines made up the municipal budget. And there was no chance of fighting this economic warfare—because doing so could also lead to a person’s arrest and jailing. The police chief sat over the municipal court.

If slavery and Jim Crow made public spectacle of our torture—people beaten, whipped, lynched and dismembered for all to see—the last part of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first century silenced us with false promises that if we just shut the fuck up and did what we were told, maybe we’d be Oprah or Puffy or LeBron, or, dare we say it, Barack Obama, when the truth was that the overwhelming majority of us spent a good portion of our time battling white supremacy, whether we knew it or not.

invented as part of the architecture of the drug war. Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade. They needed no proof or indictment even to seize cash, cars and homes, and police across the nation routinely did, leaving the burden of evidence on the person who was robbed. The victim had to prove that they had never done anything, something almost impossible to do. But even when they managed to fight and win their case, the legal barriers to reclaiming property were and are extraordinary, leaving the police, who were free to keep 80 percent of what they seized, to go on buying sprees. And what did they purchase most often? Military equipment.

We never fight, Mark Anthony and I; fighting is not our way with one another and I wonder later if maybe it would have helped. Did I feel that while Mark Anthony would always fight alongside me, it was also true that he wouldn’t fight for me, wouldn’t fight to keep me in his life as a wife and lover? I think I did. I suspected—perhaps I had always suspected—that I loved him and wanted him more than he did me.

I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it. TONI MORRISON

don’t know how to respond to him, what to ask for, what to say. We’d talked about wanting to co-parent, even as we knew we would not be monogomous. But we had talked about trying to build a family in the midst of the madness. Why is he behaving this way? Years of friendship—we had endured the second raid at St. Elmo’s Village together!—and our recently emerging romantic relationship. I leave our home and go outside and call Future, who is one of the leads of BLM Toronto.

When you go to the ER in the United States, the first place you are sent to is billing. In Canada I am sent, upon arrival, to a midwife, who examines me and does an ultrasound and assures me that the baby is okay.

But in the wake of the election, it is important that I look in the mirror, that we all do. His campaign and election has put all of our lives even more at risk. In 2016, hate crimes in the United States rose 6 percent in 25 of the largest cities. And we, Black people, were the most common target of them, with hate crimes directed at us disproportionately, at nearly 30 percent, according to FBI statistics.