When They Call You a Terrorist Read online

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  For my ancestors, and for my mother, Cherice Simpson; my fathers, Gabriel Brignac and Alton Cullors; for all my siblings; and for my new family, Janaya Khan and Shine Khan-Cullors, this book is from you and for you. Thank you for holding me down and reminding me why I am able to heal.

  —PATRISSE

  For Nisa and for Aundre and for all of our children, the ones who survive, the ones who do not.

  And for Victoria, who deserves the sun, the moon, the stars and Coney Island. And Victoria, who first believed, who has always believed.

  —asha

  And for the movement that gives us hope, and the families in whose names we serve, we will not stop pushing for a world in which we can raise all of our children in peace and with dignity.

  —PATRISSE AND asha

  It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

  It is our duty to win.

  We must love each other and support each other.

  We have nothing to lose but our chains.

  ASSATA SHAKUR

  foreword

  BY ANGELA DAVIS

  When I first met Patrisse Khan-Cullors, I could not have predicted that within a short period of time she, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, would become the face of a movement that, under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter,” would rapidly reverberate throughout the world. But I could clearly see that Patrisse and her comrades were pushing Black and left, including feminist and queer, movements to a new and more exciting level, as they seriously wrestled with contradictions that had plagued these movements for many generations.

  In this memoir, Patrisse generously shares the intimacies of her life and loves, and her unyielding devotion to the cause of freedom. The stories she tells here with asha bandele help us to understand why her approach to organizing and movement building has captured the imaginations of so many. Her story emphasizes the productive intersection of personal experiences and political resistance. The pivotal story of her brother’s repeated encounters with violence-prone police officers, for example, permits us to better understand how state violence thrives at the intersection of race and disability. 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. We learn not only about the quotidian nature of state violence but also about how art and activism can transform such tragic confrontations into catalysts for greater collective consciousness and more effective resistance.

  When They Call You a Terrorist thus illuminates a life deeply informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and religion, at the same time as it highlights the art, poetry, and indeed also the struggles, such a life can produce. But, of course, it is not only Patrisse’s brother who is called a terrorist. 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 or officially referred to as terrorists. But in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon instinctively hurled that label at me, and in 2013 Assata Shakur was designated by the FBI as one of the world’s ten most dangerous terrorists.

  There are many lessons to be gleaned from Patrisse’s memoir, not the least of which have to do with political rhetoric. 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. At the same time, racist, misogynist, and transphobic eruptions of violence continue to be normalized. The seemingly simple phrase “Black Lives Matter” has disrupted undisputed assumptions about the logic of equality, justice, and human freedom in the United States and all over the world. It has encouraged us to question the capacity of logic—Western logic—to undo the forces of history, especially the history of colonialism and slavery. This logic expresses itself through our philosophical certainties and ideological presuppositions and in our legal system, which, for example, allows for the incarceration of disproportionate numbers of black people, immigrants from the Global South, and people of recent immigrant ancestry, justifying the structural racism of such practices with references to due process and other ostensible legal guarantees of equality.

  Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her comrades within the Movement for Black Lives, which embraces many more organizations—including the Black Youth Project 100 and the Dream Defenders in Florida—are helping to produce forward-looking movement approaches that represent the best possibilities for the future of our planet. They call for an inclusiveness that does not sacrifice particularity. They recognize that universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender, and class hierarchies but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions. This recognition and the vast power of love are at the core of Patrisse’s powerful memoir.

  PART ONE

  ALL THE BONES WE COULD FIND

  introduction

  WE ARE STARDUST

  I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.

  SONIA SANCHEZ

  Days after the elections of 2016, asha sent me a link to a talk by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our own, but also people, including us, me and her. He is saying that not only are we in the universe, but that the universe is in us. He is saying that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.

  And I know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic, the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.

  I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah’s Witness and a woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping other
people’s children, working the reception desks at gyms, telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother, never giving up despite never making a living wage.

  I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a version of himself there were no mirrors for.

  And I knew it because I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this built language and honored God and created movement and upheld love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?

  Our foreparents imagined our families out of whole cloth. They imagined each individual one of us. They imagined me. They had to. It is the only way I am here, today, a mother and a wife, a community organizer and Queer, an artist and a dreamer learning to find hope while navigating the shadows of hell even as I know it might have been otherwise.

  I was not expected or encouraged to survive. My brothers and little sister, my family—the one I was born into and the one I created—were not expected to survive. We lived a precarious life on the tightrope of poverty bordered at each end with the politics of personal responsibility that Black pastors and then the first Black president preached—they preached that more than they preached a commitment to collective responsibility.

  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.

  And they preached that more than they preached about America having 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population, a population which for a long time included my disabled brother and gentle father who never raised a hand to another human being. And a prison population that, with extraordinary deliberation, today excludes the man who shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea.

  There was a petition that was drafted and circulated all the way to the White House. It said we were terrorists. We, who in response to the killing of that child, said Black Lives Matter. The document gained traction during the first week of July 2016 after a week of protests against the back-to-back police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minneapolis. At the end of that week, on July 7, in Dallas, Texas, a sniper opened fire during a Black Lives Matter protest that was populated with mothers and fathers who brought their children along to proclaim: We have a right to live.

  The sniper, identified as 25-year-old Micah Johnson, an Army reservist home from Afghanistan, holed up in a building on the campus of El Centro College after killing five police officers and wounding eleven others, including two protesters. And in the early morning hours of July 8, 2016, he became the first individual ever to be blown up by local law enforcement. They used a military-grade bomb against Micah Johnson and programmed a robot to deliver it to him. No jury, no trial. No patience like the patience shown the killers who gunned down nine worshippers in Charleston, or moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.

  Of course, we will never know what his motivations really were and we will never know if he was mentally unstable. We will only know for sure that the single organization to which he ever belonged was the U.S. Army. And we will remember that the white men who were mass killers, in Aurora and Charleston, were taken alive and one was fed fast food on the way to jail. We will remember that most of the cops who are killed in this nation are killed by white men who are taken alive.

  And we will experience all the ways the ghost of Micah Johnson will be weaponized against Black Lives Matter, will be weaponized against me, a tactic from the way back that has continuously been used against people who challenge white supremacy. We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.

  Even still, the accusation of being a terrorist is devastating, and I allow myself space to cry quietly as I lie in bed on a Sunday morning listening to a red-faced, hysterical Rudolph Giuliani spit lies about us three days after Dallas.

  Like many of the people who embody our movement, I have lived my life between the twin terrors of poverty and the police. Coming of age in the drug war climate that was ratcheted up by Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the neighborhood where I lived and loved and the neighborhoods where many of the members of Black Lives Matter have lived and loved were designated war zones and the enemy was us.

  The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know if you cannot readily imagine how someone can be doing no harm and yet be harassed by police. Literally breathing while Black became cause for arrest—or worse.

  I carry the memory of living under that terror—the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity—in my blood, my bones, in every step I take.

  And yet I was called a terrorist.

  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.

  We, the people.

  We are not terrorists.

  I am not a terrorist.

  I am Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac.

  I am a survivor.

  I am stardust.

  1

  COMMUNITY, INTERRUPTED

  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, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE

  My mother, Cherice, raises us—my older brothers Paul and Monte, my baby sister Jasmine, and me—on a block that is the main strip in my Van Nuys, California, mostly Mexican neighborhood. We live in one of ten Section 8 apartments in a two-story, tan-colored building where the paint is peeling and where there is a gate that does not close properly and an intercom system that never works.

  My mother and I are considered short in our family. She is five feet four inches, and I never get any taller than five feet two. But Jasmine, Paul and Monte are tall people, and by the time she is grown, my little sister will reach six feet. My brothers will also both soar up to well over six feet. They get it from our father, Alton Cullors, a mechanic with big, dark brown hands he uses to work the line at the GM plant in Van Nuys, hands that hold me, hug me and make me feel safe. He smells of gasoline and cars, smells that still make me think of love and snuggles and safety almost three decades on. Alton comes in and out of our home, in and out of our days, depending on how he and Mommy are getting along. By the time I am six, he will leave and never live with us again. But he won’t disappear entirely from our lives, and his love won’t disappear at all. It lingers, that good Alton Cullors love, inside me, beside me, even now, today.

  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 apartment
s 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.

  She is poor and raising her daughter alone. She has a fast kind of mouth that reminds me of the quick-tongued Black women in my own family. She wears muumuus. I miss her presence when she leaves, as she eventually does, like most of our neighbors. 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.

  But less than a mile away is Sherman Oaks, a wealthy white neighborhood with big old houses that have two-car garages, landscaped lawns and swimming pools that look nothing like the untended, postage-stamp-size one behind our apartment building. In Sherman Oaks, there is nothing that does not appear beautiful and well kept. There aren’t even apartment buildings.

  There are just expansive homes with fancy cars in front of them and parents who leave their houses each morning and drive their kids to school, a phenomenon that catches my eye the first time I see it. Mine is a neighborhood of kids who take the bus to school or walk from the time we are in first grade. Our parents are long gone to work by the time we emerge, little multicolored peepers in the springtime, our fresh brown faces trying to figure out a world we did not make and did not know we had the power to unmake.