Meet one of the queer founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
It stands to reason that when Patrisse Khan- Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter, sat down with her co-author, asha bandele, to write a memoir of this burgeoning nonviolent movement, the subject of who gets to label whom would inspire their title, When They Call You a Terrorist: a Black Lives Matter Memoir. The love-drenched narrative style of this powerful memoir charts the course of Khan- Cullors’s life, growing up in Los Angeles; hers is a narrative pierced personally by headline issues that are often glossed over, even in liberal circles, issues like structural poverty, the war on drugs, the war on gangs, mass incarceration, unequal education, and police brutality. Although Khan-Cullors, a queer woman and the recent recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize, is certainly a victorious example of how to survive racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity in America, she knows all too well that many others did not or are still fighting to get free. The memoir is a compelling series of stories that sketch out the life of a black girl child who becomes a woman, told in her own words, using her own life to illustrate what it means to be black, poor, and socially conscious in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, while working on building the community and safety that most people long for.
In the summer of 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists were sued (and have since been exonerated) for inciting violence, while conservative networks like Fox News labeled them a terrorist organization. In the fall of 2017, the FBI released a warning about what they termed “black separatist extremists,” not specifically citing BLM but stoking the fires of anti-black racism, no doubt stirred up by the Trump administration. When I asked Khan-Cullors why she and asha bandele chose When They Call You a Terrorist as their title, she said, “Growing up in Los Angeles in a working-class suburb, in the middle of the war on gangs and the war on drugs, really shaped what I understood and what would eventually be called Black Lives Matter.” She goes on to say how surreal, confusing, and disturbing it was to have BLM labeled “terrorist,” though, she says, “I was clear; this label ‘terrorist’ is similar to the label that activists and organizers were given in the ’60s and ’70s as ‘communists,’ so I understood this was part of a historical legacy in which this country deems black people, in particular when we fight for our rights and survival, as criminal.”
But before we further discuss BLM as an international movement founded by three women, Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, we should take a moment here to recognize that two of the three women are queer, Khan-Cullors and Garza. Also, we should recognize that it has often been women, the mothers, sisters, and wives of slain boys and men such as Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, who have taken up the charge to fight injustice. As Khan-Cullors tells me, “Black women have always been the architects of societies and movements. To try to marginalize us in this movement is wrong and it’s a myth. We can look at people like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, who didn’t receive the praise or the recognition they deserved because they were often competing with their male counterpoints. [But] they in fact shaped the very debate this country was having around building black power, the Democratic Party, and how we look at black, poor southern voters…We three women are the visible leaders of this movement [because] we have a better understanding of what has happened in history and how black women have been erased in history. History gets told differently when we are not visible.”
In 2015, Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia and Stanford, coined the hashtag #SayHerName to commemorate black women killed by police, beginning with Sandra Bland, who was stopped for a traffic violation that year and was found dead in her Texas jail cell three days later. A chapter of the Khan-Cullors’s book is dedicated to this issue and to Sandra Bland’s life. However, before #SayHerName, Crenshaw released a startling study of black girls in schools, entitled Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. The December 2014 study revealed a truth that Khan-Cullors had personally experienced as a child in the heavily policed culture of Los Angeles, both in and out of school; the fact that from early adolescence, black girls begin to experience harassment by police and school officials. Crenshaw’s study found that nationally black girls were suspended six times more than white girls, while black boys were suspended three times as often as white boys. Furthermore, in urban centers such as New York City and Boston, the relative risk for disciplinary action against black girls relative to white girls was 10 and 11 times more, respectively. In both cities black boys where six and eight times more likely to receive disciplinary action in schools, respectively. The fact of the matter is that black girls are extremely vulnerable to punitive treatment in schools and we don’t talk about it.
In a chapter called “Twelve,” Khan- Cullors recounts that “the first time I was arrested, I am twelve years old.” A bright child, she didn’t attend school in her working-class com- munity, but commuted to a middle school “where the gifted kids go.” But because she had low math and science grades one year, she had to go to summer school, which was taught at her neighborhood middle school. While at the local school, she forgot herself and behaved like her peers at her gifted school, who smoke weed in the bathroom before class and walk about freely, with no police presence to speak of. One day during summer school, Khan-Cullors smoked a joint in the bathroom. Someone must have said something, because two days later a police officer came into her class, handcuffed her in the front of the room, and took her to the dean. Would this public shaming have happened in her gifted school, with fewer black and brown faces in the classroom and more parents in a higher tax bracket? Probably not.
Khan-Cullors also recounts how her older brothers Paul and Monte began getting violently stopped and frisked by local police at ages 13 and 11, respectively. She writes, “There are no green spaces, no community centers to shoot hoops in, no playgrounds with handball courts, no parks for children to build castles in, so they make the alleyway their secret place… It’s from behind [a] gate that I watch the police roll up on my brothers and their friends, not one of whom is over the age of 14. I cannot cry and I cannot scream and I cannot breathe.” In many ways, When They Call You a Terrorist is an insider’s view, through the lives of a love-rich and cash-poor family, of the school-to-prison pipe- line, police brutality, and economic inequality.
The lack of human dignity that Khan-Cullors witnesses in the treatment of her brother Monte, a young man thrust into the criminal justice system and brutalized for his mental illness, the trials of her pious mother, and the pragmatism of her brother Paul, who is a man before he’s a boy, sparks her activism. Having graduated from an arts and social justice high school, it is while she was paying her way through college that Khan-Cullors begins to show signs of becoming the woman who would one day type #BlackLivesMatter on Alicia Garza’s Facebook page, and along with two friends launch a movement. She spends considerable time discussing the early moments of Black Lives Matter which I imagine will inspire the next generation of revolutionaries. It’s fair to say that the very detailed, emotional, and nuanced stories that Khan-Cullors tells of her family, and her chosen family, offer a harrowing and deeply humanizing picture of anti-black state-sanctioned violence in America.
Along with her co-author, asha bandele, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, now the mother of a black son and a partner in a healthy queer relationship, seeks to send us a message. When They Call You a Terrorist: a Black Lives Matter Memoir oddly reminds me of the feeling I had when I first watched The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. Certainly, the memoir and the movie are wildly different in tone, but as narratives of queer life in America there is a similar kind of magic. I say this with the utmost respect for the heart-wrenching trials and triumphs of Khan-Cullors’s life, but her narrative of growing up queer and black, and becoming a woman and a revolutionary is a gift for those who remember the wonders of growing up, despite it all: the love of family, the excitement of first loves, the courage of walking your own path, and the satisfaction of building your own community or chosen family. Perhaps I’m caught in the foggy memory of that film, but I’ll never forget how it made me feel, and this memoir had a very similar though profoundly deeper effect. A feeling of love.
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