Commentary: When They Call You a Terrorist + Brown Girl Dreaming
By Chava Possum
For the March Decolonize This Book Club meeting, we read Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ memoir When They Call You a Terrorist as well as Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming. While Khan-Cullors’ memoir is written in prose and Woodson’s in verse, and while both texts are set in different eras of American history, together, they declare boldly: Black lives matter, Black girls matter, and stories can change the world.
Alongside Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, Patrisse Khan-Cullors co-founded the Movement for Black Lives, immortalized by #BlackLivesMatter. Since its founding, the Movement for Black Lives has faced controversy and hostility from politicians, the media, and even fellow community members. Generalized as violent, dangerous, and “radical”, the Movement for Black Lives has been labeled a “terrorist organization” and the organizers behind it “terrorists”, following a historical and distinctly American pattern of convincing the public that those who have been terrorized by white supremacy are, in fact, the terrorists and who must be put down by any means necessary, even violent means. And here we find the heart of Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ memoir: in America, terrorism is a racist construction used to demonize Black and Brown people organizing for human rights and to permit violence by white people for the benefit of U.S imperialism.
In Angela Davis’s foreword to the book, she explores the contradictions in the label “terrorist” and how that label is used by white supremacist systems. She writes,
“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.”
When you hear the word “terrorist” what images come to mind automatically? For me, as a child raised during the Iraq War and “the war on terror”, the word “terrorist” conjures images of Brown Muslims. Every day, I work to dismantle that image burned into my brain from a young age, but I’d be lying if I claimed it wasn’t still there. Decolonizing is a life-long effort. But, if you’re from another generation, perhaps your image is different. What do you see? What do you feel? And be honest. I’ll be honest first: my brain does not immediately put forth images of white men who commit a majority of the mass shootings in this country. Why not?
Propaganda is defined as, “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Growing up, I was fed propaganda that the people of Iraq and all the surrounding nations were all terrorists and that’s why we were there fighting a war. It took years to learn that, no, we were the terrorists, there to steal resources for ourselves and to destroy entire civilizations. And it took years more to learn that this was not the first time we’d done this. In fact, it’s all we do. From the genocide against the Native Americans, to the enslavement of Africans, to the criminalization of Black and Brown lives, it’s all the same story: a story of white supremacy spilling blood, then pointing the finger at the victims. When They Call You a Terrorist was an important next step in my learning journey, pushing me to examine how the term “terrorism” is wielded against Black Americans.
In chapter 8, aptly titled “Zero Dark Thirty”, Patrisse shares a story about one of her brothers, named Monte, a tall, kind, and playful kid who was later diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, like me. The first time that Monte encounters the police is when he’s still a kid— a pre-teen patted down and violated by police officers for playing with his friends in an alleyway, the only safe place near their apartment where kids can just be kids. And from this moment on, Monte is in and out of juvie, jail, and then prison, always for things that would be explained away for any white kid as simply mistakes. But for Monte, as a Black man, mistakes are not allowed.
When Monte came home from his first prison bid in 2003, his mother was living in Section 8 housing, which means she isn’t allowed to have anyone living with her who has been convicted of a crime. Monte chooses to live with his girlfriend, who is chronically disabled after being shot and who is not able to care for Monte to the degree he needs.
In 2006, Patrisse finds Monte in the hospital after a fender-bender, guarded by two LAPD officers. When they found Monte in the middle of a schizoaffective episode, they don’t care to wonder if his erratic behavior is due to a mental illness; instead, they shoot him with rubber bullets and tase him. When they tell Patrisse, they laugh. They laugh. Then, they charge him with terrorism.
Why? Surely there’s a good reason, right? Terrorism is a pretty intense charge to just throw around.
He got into a fender-bender with a white woman. She called the police. He never touched her, but because he was in an episode and because he was Black, he was deemed dangerous and then brutalized. Can you imagine getting into a fender bender and getting charged with terrorism for it? A fender bender is usually no big deal, but when you’re Black living in a white supremacist country, minor, everyday occurrences become lethal.
Monte’s story continues. Two days later, he is transferred to Twin Towers as a high-power alert prisoner, which means,
“Monte is kept in his cell 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, a condition that has long been proven to instigate mental illness in those who previously had been mentally unstable. In my brother’s case, he deteriorates quickly, predictably, horribly and without a single doctor on that staff to assert the Oath: first do no harm.”
Patrisse learns that the jailers are withholding Monte’s medications. Why?
“The cheaper alternative to medicating Monte is strapping him down in five-point restraints in a room by himself. Reduces the cost of not only the medication itself, but guards and likely food.”
When they see Monte for his hearing in court, he is strapped down, screaming for help. As he leaves on a stretcher, he shouts, “MOM!!!!!!!!!!!” Their public defender takes no interest in helping Monte, so Patrisse steps into her power as an organizer and utilizes her loving community of friends and family to get Monte a lawyer. Although the lawyer can’t get Monte out of this entirely, he gets one of his strikes struck from the record, which means that he isn’t facing life in prison at the very least.
Monte’s return home after another 6 years inside, however, is pock-marked by trauma. During an episode, they are trying to get Monte to take his anti-anxiety medication when he cycles into a full-on PTSD-induced flashback.
“Monte flashes back to his first time in County Jail, when he was beaten and starved, and before we can stop him, he is in the bathroom where he starts drinking from the toilet. A toilet, during a part of his time in LA County Jail, was all he had to drink from.”
I’ll tell you what, after I read that chapter, I had a radically new understanding of what terrorism really is.
To quote one of my fellow book club members, “After surviving all that Patrisse and her family have been through, how could she not start a movement for Black lives?” I believe that many white people who see BLM as a violent movement don’t know the truth of what the police and the prison industrial complex are capable of and what they do to human beings every single day. If they do it to someone, then they will do it to you too. My mother used to say, you can’t hate someone once you know their story. I feel that When They Call You a Terrorist is an effective tool to alter perspectives around policing and incarceration. Patrisse’s story, filled with love and loss, excitement and betrayal, fear and joy, can open eyes. It certainly opened mine even wider.
The story of police brutality and incarceration also arises in Woodson’s memoir, when her uncle is sent to Riker’s Island and then to a prison upstate. In both memoirs, we see the same missing puzzle pieces; fathers, brothers, uncles, lovers, gone. Taken. Rendered invisible. Declared terrorists after lifetimes— generations— of state-sanctioned terror. Woodson’s poetry does not spend as much time on this as in When They Call You a Terrorist, but it’s there. Out of the frame, but present. And in some ways this is how Woodson writes; she captures not only what’s in focus, but also what lingers just out of reach, just out of sight. She sees it and speaks to it. As we all must do.
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