When They Call You a Terrorist

Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Description

The powerful memoir of one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter which explores how the movement was born, adapted for young adults and featuring brand new content including photos and journal entriesA movement that started with a hashtag - #BlackLivesMatter - and spread across the world. From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Khan-Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimised by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength and resilience, Khan-Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• EAN13: 9781838855215
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

ALSO BY
patrisse khan-cullors
AND
asha bandele
when they call you a terrorist: a black lives matter memoir


 
First published in Great Britain in 2021
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
First published in the United States in 2020 by Wednesday Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, 2020
Foreword copyright © Angela Davis, 2017
The right of Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 520 8
eISBN 978 1 83885 521 5
Designed by Omar Chapa and Anna Gorovoy
For my ancestors, and for my mother, Cherice Simpson; my fathers, Gabriel Brignac and Alton Cullors; for all my siblings; and for my new family, Janaya Khan and Shine Khan-Cullors, this book is from you and for you. Thank you for holding me down and reminding me why I am able to heal .
PATRISSE
For Nisa and for Aundre and for all of our children, the ones who survive, the ones who do not .
And for Victoria, who deserves the sun, the moon, the stars and Coney Island. And Victoria, who first believed, who has always believed .
asha
And for the movement that gives us hope, and the families in whose names we serve, we will not stop pushing for a world in which we can raise all of our children in peace and with dignity .
PATRISSE AND asha
contents
Foreword by Angela Davis
Dear Reader
PART ONE: All the Bones We Could Find
Introduction: We Are Stardust
1. Community, Interrupted
2. Twelve
3. Bloodlines
4. Magnitude and Bond
5. Witness
6. Out in the World
7. All the Bones We Could Find
PART TWO: Black Lives Matter
8. Zero Dark Thirty: The Remix
9. No Ordinary Love
10. Dignity and Power. Now.
11. Black Lives Matter
12. Raid
13. A Call, a Response
14. #sayhername
15. Black Futures
16. When They Call You a Terrorist
Recommended Reading and Viewing
Acknowledgments
It is our duty to fight for our freedom .
It is our duty to win .
We must love each other and support each other .
We have nothing to lose but our chains .
ASSATA SHAKUR
foreword
BY ANGELA DAVIS
When I first met Patrisse Khan-Cullors, I could not have pre dicted that within a short period of time she, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, would become the face of a movement that, under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter,” would rapidly reverberate throughout the world. But I could clearly see that Patrisse and her comrades were pushing Black and left, including feminist and queer, movements to a new and more exciting level, as they seriously wrestled with contradictions that had plagued these movements for many generations.
In this memoir, Patrisse generously shares the intimacies of her life and loves, and her unyielding devotion to the cause of freedom. The stories she tells here with asha bandele help us to understand why her approach to organizing and movement building has captured the imaginations of so many. Her story emphasizes the productive intersection of personal experiences and political resistance. The pivotal story of her brother’s repeated encounters with violence-prone police officers, for example, permits us to better understand how state violence thrives at the intersection of race and disability. That Monte—Patrisse’s brother—is shot with rubber bullets and charged with terrorism as a routine police response to a manic episode reveals how readily the charge of terrorism is deployed within white supremacist institutions. We learn not only about the quotidian nature of state violence but also about how art and activism can transform such tragic confrontations into catalysts for greater collective consciousness and more effective resistance.
When They Call You a Terrorist thus illuminates a life deeply informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and religion, at the same time as it highlights the art, poetry and indeed also the struggles such a life can produce. But, of course, it is not only Patrisse’s brother who is called a terrorist. It is Patrisse herself, and her co-workers and comrades—including Alicia, Opal and the other organizers and activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter network and movement—whose commitments and achievements are maligned with the label of terrorism. 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.
There are many lessons to be gleaned from Patrisse’s memoir, not the least of which have to do with political rhetoric. The very title, When They Call You a Terrorist , 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. At the same time, racist, misogynist and transphobic eruptions of violence continue to be normalized. The seemingly simple phrase “Black Lives Matter” has disrupted undisputed assumptions about the logic of equality, justice and human freedom in the United States and all over the world. It has encouraged us to question the capacity of logic—Western logic—to undo the forces of history, especially the history of colonialism and slavery. This logic expresses itself through our philosophical certainties and ideological presuppositions and in our legal system, which, for example, allows for the incarceration of disproportionate numbers of Black people, immigrants from the Global South and people of recent immigrant ancestry, justifying the structural racism of such practices with references to due process and other ostensible legal guarantees of equality.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her comrades within the Movement for Black Lives, which embraces many more organizations—including the Black Youth Project 100 and the Dream Defenders in Florida—are helping to produce forward-looking movement approaches that represent the best possibilities for the future of our planet. They call for an inclusiveness that does not sacrifice particularity. They recognize that universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender and class hierarchies but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions. This recognition and the vast power of love are at the core of Patrisse’s powerful memoir.
Dear Reader,
For as long as I have been cognizant of myself and the world around me, for as long as I’ve had memory, I have felt like an outsider, an other. This deep-rooted sense of being different was powerful and pervasive, bleeding into everything from the inside out. My sexuality wasn’t the same, even if I didn’t yet have a name for or comprehension of it. I was pulled from the schools my friends and neighbors and peers attended and sent elsewhere with people who didn’t look, think or experience as I did. Without fully understanding what those around me were feeling, I knew what I was journeying through didn’t line up. And then there was that thing I couldn’t hide behind or keep to myself: I didn’t look like my siblings, all three of whom shared a family resemblance. Those things that say you belong, that you’re one of the fingers on the hand. I stood out and knew I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed.
When I’d ask my mother about it, which I did with increasing frequency as I came up, she’d either change the subject or out-and-out lie. One explanation—“You look like me when I was your age”—just didn’t add up. It wasn’t possible; she wouldn’t have changed that drastically. She wasn’t being truthful, but I couldn’t confirm it. I knew it; I did! What had started as an inkling soon exploded into dead-on certainty. And yet, I had no tangible proof and didn’t seem likely to get any. Which was a difficult and extremely unsettling place to be.
I didn’t have that thing, that look that moved between my two older brothers and younger sister. I didn’t look like my father, either. We didn’t appear to be related. Our physicalities didn’t interconnect.
What I also didn’t have was a willingness to quit. Being put off and ignored only fed my curiosity; it spread and consumed me; it grew like a weed. The denials rattled and distressed; yes, they did. But they couldn’t deter or distract me. They couldn’t break my commitment. Though I was profoundly frustrated, the brick wall left me hungrier to get my hands on the real story. That deep need and fight for the truth I had a right to was the birth of my defiance; it helped shape how I approach and navigate the world.
I was 11 when my mother told me that the man who was the father of my siblings, the man I’d believed was my own father, too, was not. It was devastating to hear it, a punch to my chest. I was terrified and more alone than ever, more singular it seemed, and yet the truth, finally, was somehow setting me free. It was a kind of closure I’d been desperate for. It was satisfying. I was intrigued and eager to learn more. I was excited.
A new j