Book Review: When They Call You A Terrorist - A Black Lives Matter Memoir

[Image: The book cover which is an abstract painting of reds, orange, pink, and a little blue smeared all over. The title is written in in white lowercase letters, "when they call you a terrorist a black lives matter memoir." Below that in black lowercase letters the authors are listed "patrisse khan-cullors & asha bandele with a foreward by angela davis."]

Also posted to my goodreads

It is only February, but I can say without a doubt that "When They Call You a Terrorist" is one of the best and most important books of 2018. In fact, I woulld stretch that out to say this entire century. The book lists both Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele as authors, but the memoir itself is Khan-Cullors's story and life. I do not know how the process of writing went, but I can say that the writing in this book is phenomenal. It allows the reader to seamlessly enter the story and understand the pain caused by white supremacy, poverty, addiction, mental illness, police brutality, the prison industrial complex, and many other attacks on the lives of Black and other marginalized people. It also captures the love, comradery, forgiveness, and resilience shown by many who are facing down the worst odds. The beginning of all chapters are peppered with appropriately corresponding quotes from some of the greatest writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin and Octavia Butler.

I could see this book benefiting someone with a similar life to Khan-Cullors or someone as different as an ignorant white republican who says "all lives matter" when someone says Black lives do. Perhaps I am being too idealistic, but I can't imagine how anyone could willingly read this book and not close it out with a visceral support for and better understanding of Black Lives Matter and other related movements and the atrocities that inspired them.

 "Twelve... was the year I learned that being Black and poor definied me more than being bright and hopeful and ready."

The prose in this book comes from writers with a multifaceted passion, able to build vivid worlds out of words. Memoirs aren't usually my thing, but this one definitely is. This book is not only an exquisitely written life and love-of-Black-life story, but also a manifesto for a better world. Skillfully woven throughout Khan-Cullors's story are statements about the world at large, statistics about these statements, and clear reasoning for actions taken and those that need to be taken. The book conveys the specific life experiences of Khan-Cullors which include poverty, abuse, a sibling who struggles with psychosis, multiple family members serving long prison sentences for mild nonviolent offenses (or not offense at all,) midnight raids while she and a partner lie asleep in bed, near constant police harrassment and severe police violence against multiple people in her life, loss of friends due to queerantagonism and misogyny, as well as huge and successful anti-racist and prison abolition organizing efforts, love and loss and love again, building new family and community, and a great many other successes against all odds. At the same time, the book captures the big picture of how all of these experiences fit into larger systems in a larger world and offers a variety of ways to understand and combat these systems.

"...there are no stats to track collateral deaths (as a result of police violence,) the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that become cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke. Slow deaths. Undocumented deaths. Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain't worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable."

Khan-Cullors and Bandele also do well to make clear how Queer Black women were at the center of these organizing efforts- particularly BLM but also many others. Men have remained centered in much reporting Black Lives Matter. There is a long history of (often but not always straight cis) men silencing Queer women at the center of movements like these. This book is a clear antidote to that.  I hope that people will read this book as it is such an incredibly important and informative relic of our time. I believe it tells the past, present, and future. I hope it is a book we look back upon one day as an example of a critically important time in our history. If I hadn't already experienced the white supremacist patriarchal travesty that is public school system history class curriculums, I would say that I hope this book ends up being taught in high school. But, according to this book, maybe I deserve that hope:

"We say we deserve another knowing, the knowing that comes when you assume your life will be long, will be vibrant, will be healthy. We deserve to imagine a world without prisons and punishment, a world where they are not needed, a world rooted in mutuality. We deserve to at least aim for that."


Black Lives Matter.