Review: ‘When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir’

Review: ‘When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir’

This book is powerful, maddening, joyous, sad, romantic, uplifting, humble, honest and true. Patrisse Khan-Cullors (with asha bandele) does a fantastic job telling her amazing and yet all too typical story.
Author Patrisse Khan-Cullors
Amazing, because this young, black and queer woman has managed to create a community full of love, respect and activism in a world not created for her. Typical, because the harassment and abuse she and her family have suffered at the hands of overzealous law enforcement officials, underfunded and overwhelmed social programs, and abusive prison authorities happen to black and brown people every day.
When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (St. Martin’s Press) is not a long read, but it took me a while to finish, mostly because I had to stop occasionally to process and think about the many points the authors make. Like how, in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings in 1999, it wasn’t predominantly white schools like the one she attended that installed metal detectors, even though mass shootings are much rarer in predominantly black schools. Like how the young men in her neighborhood would be terrorized by the cops and strip-searched on suspicion of minor infractions, even though the white weed dealer at her high school had no fear of getting arrested.
EXCERPT: “At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for years of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm… our mothers and fathers and daughters and sons were criminalized for choices they made often out of absolute desperation and lack of any real options.”
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