Patrisse Khan-Cullors is an artist, organiser and freedom fighter from Los Angeles, CA. Co-founder of Black Lives Matter, she is also a performance artist, Fulbright scholar, popular public speaker and an NAACP History Maker. asha bandele, author of the bestselling memoir, The Prisoner's Wife, has been honoured for her work in journalism, fiction, poetry and activism. A mother and a former senior editor at Essence magazine, asha serves as a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, 2017
Foreword copyright © Angela Davis, 2017
First published in the United States in 2018 by St Martin’s Press
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 304 8
ISBN 978 1 78689 305 5
Export ISBN 978 1 78689 303 1
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
PART ONE: All the Bones We Could Find
7. All the Bones We Could Find
8. Zero Dark Thirty: The Remix
16. When They Call You a Terrorist
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 predicted 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