In When They Call You a Terrorist, Khan-Cullors recalls the shame she felt as a child for her silence in the face of racial injustice. Her deeply felt memoir is a blueprint of how that silence exploded into a scream heard around the world ... Co-written by poet and journalist Asha Bandele, this personal and political book, subtitled 'A Black Lives Matter Memoir,' is also timely. It comes during a still-unfolding moment when women are demanding to be heard... She learned early all the ways African-Americans are barred at the door, and how their lives are under constant threat from the police, the government, and the institutions that are intended to protect but instead oppress ... Yet what she also experiences is the strength of a community that understands it can best take care of its own ... Like Baldwin, Khan-Cullors wants only for her nation to live up to its ideals, and afford everyone the same opportunities and protections.
In her new book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Khan-Cullors explores her own personal journey, from her childhood in Van Nuys, California, to becoming one of the leaders – if perhaps not as well known as others – of the latest incarnation of the US civil rights movement ...Khan-Cullor also reflects on her father, Gabriel, his struggles with addiction, his own incarcerations for drug offenses and the social and political conditions that fuel abuses of drugs and the justice system ... In this way, the memoir hints at many of the broader ways black lives ought to matter – not just when a police officer or vigilante kills an unarmed black teen, but in the broadest sense: to matter every day ... Toward the end of the memoir, Khan-Cullors reflects on the intention behind those actions, and how they make people outside of the movement uncomfortable or purposely inconvenience them in the service of an argument.
The book is subtitled 'A Black Lives Matter Memoir,' but only the last quarter is devoted to the genesis of the movement in 2013... Most of this ruminative volume is instead about Khan-Cullors’s life as a child and a teenager, when the heavy pull of shame and sadness kept her tethered to a more private world of confusion and pain ... Khan-Cullors gives us the personal background, located in her life ... There’s a persistent longing that threads through this book — not so much for the consumerist dream represented by Sherman Oaks, but for the secure relationships she saw her wealthy, white classmates taking for granted ... As a black, queer woman, Khan-Cullors is the kind of activist conservative politicians get panicky about, though they ostensibly share with her an overlapping area of concern.
Khan-Cullors’s memoir is gorgeously nonlinear. She tells her story in the voice of the clear-eyed analytical adult, as if responding to the very relevant question 'How did I get here, you ask?' with, 'Well, let me tell you.' Memoir is a tricky genre: It narrates both a particular set of linked occurrences and an ongoingness indicating that similar things have happened across time. By juxtaposing Khan-Cullors’s childhood memories with the activism to which she has devoted her adult life, the memoir gives us the events as well as their social and historical contexts.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, authors of the new book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, are self-described 'prison abolitionists.' And they hope their book will inspire readers to consider a society where jails aren’t necessary ... The pages reveal the racial profiling and police brutality that Khan-Cullors and her family have experienced, the circumstances that led to the formation of one of the most controversial civil rights movements, and the way in which her narrative of black liberation has been branded as 'terrorism' ... The two activists also discussed 'gender justice,' which stresses the importance of not devaluing the leadership of women. Khan-Cullors referenced black history icons such as Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer to demonstrate how the work of black women has often been overshadowed by men.
The losses contained in the pages of When They Call You a Terrorist are acute, but they are rendered with lucidity and lyricism; the endings of many chapters have a lilting, almost incantatory rhythm ... Hardship can birth tenacity more formidable than fear, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s story, told so evocatively in When They Call You a Terrorist, is proof of it. Even as she acknowledges the dire character of the present, she refuses to bow before it.
And so the title of Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ triumphant life story, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir is a deliberate, courageous and necessary rebuttal of the propaganda that would undermine the Black Lives Matter movement by painting it, absurdly, as 'hate.' Written with journalist and author asha bandele, Khan-Cullors charts her development as an activist and community organizer from childhood to now, as one of the three creators of #BlackLivesMatter and the movement that grew out of their hashtag... What’s remarkable about her story is that for all of her earned anger against the systems and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality — too often to fatal ends —Khan-Cullors’ narrative is brimming with love ... Khan-Cullors and bandele paint a vivid portrait of growing up in 1990s Van Nuys, a poor black and Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles... Throughout the book, Khan-Cullors and bandele personalize the radical love that fuels her work's theory and praxis.
While Khan-Cullors outlines the reasons for some of Black Lives Matter’s tactics, particularly its emphasis on inclusivity and a decentralized organization, readers won’t find Situation Room-style play-by-plays here ... While its importance will not be in doubt, for the significance of Black Lives Matter cannot be overstated, the book’s necessity comes from its other subject. 'I am Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac,' its author writes in her introduction. And indeed, between the moments spent serving everyone else, the rest of the book — chronicling her evolving sexual identity, her radical redefinition of love, her relationships and eventually the birth of her child — uncovers just who she is.
The first memoir to come from one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movements, When They Call You A Terrorist is not only an inside look at the development of BLM but also a look at the more personal side of its foundations. Offering up a look at how her own upbringing as a Black woman, the memoir promises a more nuanced and personal take on the many issues that drive the movement.
With assistance from Bandele, Khan-Cullors synthesizes memoir and polemic to discuss oppressive policing and mass imprisonment, the hypocrisy of the drug war, and other aspects of white privilege, portraying the social network–based activism of BLM and like-minded groups as the only rational response to American-style apartheid. She argues repeatedly and powerfully that mechanisms have evolved to ensnare working-class people of color from childhood, while white Americans are afforded leniency in their youthful trespasses ... The author’s passion is undeniable and infectious, but the many summary-based passages sometimes feel repetitive, and the concrete narrative of BLM’s expanding activism is underdeveloped ... Not without flaws but an important account of coming of age (and rage) within today’s explosive racial dynamic.
Over the course of the book, she plots the hardships she and her family experienced on a larger map of social and racial injustice in America. Steeped in humanity and powerful prose, Khan-Cullors’s memoir describes her brother’s battle with mental illness, her father’s drug addition, both of the men’s multiple encounters with the criminal justice system, and her own life in an economically disenfranchised Southern California community ... This is an eye-opening and eloquent coming-of-age story from one of the leaders in the new generation of social activists.
As a result of the book’s extended focus, the story sometimes jumps around in unexpected ways, but the payoff is worth it. The authors don’t simply bridge the gap between the personal and the political; they purposefully meld these domains together ... This book is about Patrisse Khan-Cullors as much as it is about our current moment, wherein Black people, Muslims, the mentally ill, immigrants, women, trans folks, and others are one fender bender away from being beaten and charged with terrorism. The authors make clear that each of us needs to answer the question: what will I do when they call me a terrorist — because who among us won’t be?
