Review: When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele

£16.99

Review by Sean Bell

THAT Patrisee Khan-Cullors’ new memoir of both a life and a movement – co-written with journalist Asha Bandele – should begin with an introduction from Angela Davis puts this work immediately into context. The revolutionary who purchased the guns used in the Soledad Brothers’ doomed attempt at liberation does not offer her endorsement lightly, and the relevance of her perspective – damned as a terrorist by Richard Nixon whilst featuring on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted – is obvious.

As Davis points out, the title of this book, written by one of the women who gave Black Lives Matter a name, “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.”

Black Lives Matter was a movement born out of intersectionality – the attempted understanding of the ways in which different modes of systemic oppression feed off and sustain each other. Davis has been applying intersectional analysis to America and its horrors since before the term existed, so her appreciation of the movement should not be underestimated, particularly when the memoir that follows so unflinchingly bears it out.

Like Davis and the liberation movements she helped lead and inspire, Black Lives Matter faced attempts to discredit it through insult, innuendo, smears, abuse, hypocrisy and violence from its inception. Many who professed sympathy with its stated aims disingenuously bemoaned its methods, its militancy, its refusal to mask its anger. Meanwhile, others who confused principle with opportunism, from pundits to presidential candidates, have rarely sustained their support, particularly when ensconced within the American status quo rather more comfortably than those who took to the streets.

It might naively be hoped that, given the benefit of time and reflection, the obscene and seemingly never-ending lies told about Black Lives Matter – that it was a vehicle for unthinking anti-Americanism, that it celebrated ‘thugs’ and ‘cop-killers’, or that its rage was in excess of what was necessary – might fade into ridiculousness and irrelevance.

Recent years should have rendered us too cynical to believe that. More than three decades after Assata Shakur’s escape from prison and flight to Cuba as a political exile, the spectacle of last year’s Women’s March honouring her name was still enough to drive much of American conservatism into apoplexy. Against that backdrop, the words quoted by Khan-Cullors and Bandele are significant: “It is our duty to win,” says Shakur – because neither victory or truth are assured by the passage of time.

When They Call You a Terrorist is simultaneously a memoir of an individual, the society that produced her, the communities who recognised her and the masses who suffered alongside her. Khan-Cullors, one of four children, was raised in the Van Nuys neighbourhood of Los Angeles, a place notable but not unique for the brutality of its policing and near-inescapability of its poverty – both racially focused. Khan-Cullors discovers early on – she became an activist with the civil rights group the Bus Riders Union while still a teenager – that the conditions under which she and so many others grew up were no natural disaster, nor were they accidental.

As a poor, black, queer woman, Khan-Cullors learned to recognise the interlocking of racism, misogyny, homophobia and capitalism personally, and often tragically. She grows up both aware of the countless ways society has deemed her an outsider, and of the fact that such unfairness extends far beyond her own self.

Her older brother Monte, abandoned by the system in every manner except those in which it could do him harm, enters the American prison-industrial complex with his untreated mental illness made worse by torture. “If prisons are supposed to make society more safe,” Khan-Cullors wonders, “why do I feel so much pain and hurt?”

It is the 2013 acquittal of the murderous fantasist George Zimmerman, who in his own and many other (white) minds performed a great civic duty by shooting to death the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, that spurred Khan-Cullors, along with fellow organisers Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, to articulate what would quickly and unstoppably become Black Lives Matter.

Khan-Cullors recognises the extraordinary discipline and achievements of that movement, but acknowledges what has transpired in these past few strange years. The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it’s going to have to bend around an orange plutocrat to reach justice.

Unlike too many others, Khan-Cullors recognises that Trump is a product, not an instigator, of the white supremacy and capitalist hegemony that prop up American politics. Should Hillary Clinton have won in 2016, Khan-Cullors writes, “she would have still pushed an agenda that elevated the American Empire in terrible ways. But the loss of even the most compromising of agreements, accords and legislation means that we are starting from negative numbers.”

Black Lives Matter was one more step on a long journey. That journey is not linear – it is possible to go backwards. In 2017, as white supremacists prepared to march towards Charlottesville, the FBI counterterrorism division declared that America was under threat from “Black Identity Extremists.”

Angela Davis and Assata Shakur knew exactly what to do when they call you a terrorist; you do not shrink, apologise, or cede the argument to those who believe their own lie. You fight on your own terms. This book shows that such lessons have not been forgotten.