A review by shewantsthediction
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by asha bandele, Patrisse Khan-Cullors

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

Unfortunate that this starts off with a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote, as he's confirmed to have committed sexual assault. But overall, I wasn't prepared for how PHENOMENAL this book is.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors explains in a very personal way how institutional racism—such as police brutality, the disproportionate incarceration of Black/men fathers, and lack of access to healthcare for the poor and mentally ill—has directly and negatively impacted herself, her family and her loved ones, and almost every single aspect of her life. If you want to know exactly why and how the Black Lives Matter movement got started, READ THIS. Honestly this should've been the first book everybody grabbed back in June, rather than Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be An Antiracist. 🙄 Sorry not sorry. Even people who "disagree" with BLM need to read this, because maybe then they can understand the conditions it was born out of.

Only thing I'm iffy on is that the author describes her SO Mark Anthony in a way that reads as very fetishistic/colorist to me as a mixed person.

At the age of 12, I am on my own. No longer in the world as a child, as a small human, innocent and in need of support. I saw it happen to my brothers and now it was happening to me. This moment when we become the thing that's no longer adorable or cherished. The year we become a thing to be discarded.

[...] We will learn in the harshest of ways that this is what it means to be young and queer. You can do nothing wrong whatsoever. You can just be alive in yourself, and that is enough to have the whole of your life smashed to the ground and swept away, and all you can do is watch.

Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father? A man the world always presented with limited choices. My father attended schools that did little more than train him to serve another man's dreams, insure another man's wealth, produce another man's vision. The schooling available to my parent's generation did not encourage creativity, the fostering of dreams, the watering of the seeds of hope. Only service.

Older now, I know I am not only beginning to understand the complexity of human beings and society, but I am also sure that the binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see how more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.

We wanna say, before those who do not think about it, what it means to live your whole life under surveillance. Your life as the bullseye. [...] At my home, we, mostly women, talk about what we deserve. We say we deserve a 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. We agree that there's something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community, when you think you will not live. That the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude. One that dismisses hope, that discards dreams. We deserve, we say, what so many others take for granted: decent food, food beyond the 7-11's and Taco Bells that populated the neighborhood that brought me forth. We deserve healthy, organic and whole food that nourishes the body and the brain. That allows for both the full course of energy and the full rest of sleep at the end of the day, well-lived and balanced with service, love, and dreaming. We deserve to know life without the threat of heart attacks at 50, or strokes or diabetes and blindness because the food we have access to and can afford is a loaded gun. And shelter, we deserve that too. Not the shelter that's lined with asbestos in the walls, or walls that are too thin to keep out the cold. Not the shelter with pipes that pour lead-based water onto our skin, down our throats in Flint and North Dakota and York and Mississippi, and places that never make the news. We deserve the kind of shelter our hard work demands, homes that are safe and non-toxic and well-lit and warm. And a shelter that is not a cage, whether that cage is a prison or its free-world equivalent. A shelter where our gifts are watered, where they have the space to grow, a greenhouse for all that we pull from our dreaming and are allowed to plant. We deserve to be our own gardeners and deserve to have gardeners. Teachers that bring the sunlight, the rain, the whispered voices above the seedling that say, "Grow, baby, grow." We deserve love. Thick, full-bodied, and healthy love. And we take that message to the people in Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. The idea that in this place and in this time, when hate and the harshest version of living dominate, when even the worst assaults are blamed on victims, when bullying has become ever-present, limitless, we have come to say that we can be more than the worst of the hate. We say, "This is what we mean when we say 'Black Lives Matter.'" 

And despite it being part of the historical record that it is always women who do work, even as men get the praise, it takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters in the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work. The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on Twitter, when the number of followers one has can supplant the everyday unheralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly, or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the Civil Rights Movement, women whose names go unspoken, unknown. So too did this dynamic unfold as a nation began to realize that we were a movement. Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work. But neither did we want nor deserve to be erased. I can tell you it was painful to watch the story of BLM told without us, but the truth is that it was enraging. 
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