When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandel
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
I usually just use my trusty Libby app from my local library to listen to my audiobook selections.
And listen yall…..it ain’t always the best experience….my local library selection isn’t always the greatest when it comes to having new or “new-ish” (like released in the last couple years) or even just popular books available to check out.
I tried out Audible before but dang….it was pricey! I loved having such a great selection but just could NOT validate the expense.
So…I resigned myself to just deal with my library app with hella long waitlists and pretty limited selection.
UNTIL LAST WEEK WHEN MY BOOK LIFE CHANGED FOREVER.
I was told about the Scribd app.
(Elizabeth—girl—you ARE THE MOST AMAZING PERSON EVVEERRRRR…THANK YOUUUUUUUUUU)
Yall…it is a FLAT MONTHLY FEE of just $9.99 and you have UNLIMITED access…PLUS tons of great reads to choose from. (I’ll only be using for audiobooks BUT they also do e-books and magazines too)
When I was searching to see how many of my “must read” titles were on there (I keep an unrealistically long ass list in my iphone Notes), my excitement GREW and GREW…
THEY WERE ALL THERE!!!!!😱
Yall know how I breeze thru audiobooks….so I will TOTES get my 10 bucks worth each month AND I don’t have to wait forever for the library to get it’s life together.
Book nerd score for MEEEEEEE!
BTW I am NOT getting to paid to name drop or advertise….but hey, if someone who works for Scribd is reading this and wants to drop me a free month (or two or five), I’d be SUPER happy about it and will gladly continue to sing your praises up on here 😁
This was my very first “read” on the app…and it was such an impactful and important one.
This book was an absolute masterpiece of a memoir.
It was written with so much strength, vulnerability, beauty, directness, and eye opening honesty.
Here is the official summary:
“A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America―and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free.
Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.
Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin.
Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country―and the world―that Black Lives Matter.
When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele’s reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.”
In these pages, Patrisse tells her story….her growing from a child into adulthood…. and the experiences that she journeyed thru along the way that made her who she is.
She tells us about the people who she holds dear to her heart….her family members, her romantic partners, her cherished friendships, her community.
And what she also tells us is what it is like to live being black, female and queer in America.
How abuse, oppression, mistreatment and injustice are unfairly inflicted in every area of her life.
The heartbreaking and infuriating realities Patrisse has experienced and has watched her loved ones and her community experience time and time again is what pushed her into her tireless and steadfast activist work.
Reading her poetic and gripping words, you will see how she worked and collaborated to co-create the Black Lives Matter movement.
This book is not solely about the “how” of Black Lives Matter….it is mostly about the “why”.
And we need to LISTEN UP.
We need to listen not just to Patrisse’s story, but also the stories she tells about her brothers, her parents, her ancestors, her friends, her lovers, her neighbors.
Patrisse talks about her first hand experiences with inhumane mass incarcaration, our dangerous policing system, failures of public schools, and inadequacies of health care.
And she also talks about her first hand experiences with emerging sexuality, defining womanhood, and exploring spirituality.
She calls us all to not just LISTEN to marginalized voices….she calls us to ACT.
Because precious lives continue to be traumatized, dehumanized and lost EVERY DAY.
And THIS MUST END.
She calls us all to STAND UP and FIGHT each and every single injustice…and the time is NOW.
This book is of vital importance and I encourage you to read it.
If you do not know much about the Black Lives Matter movement or it’s co-founders, you can go to their website below.
EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT IT…..go there anyway.
Listen up and read some more.
Because I know some of yall out there have some extremely jacked up ideas in your head about what BLM is and you need to hear some TRUTH.
(and while you are there, go ahead and donate some $$ too!)
To end this review, I want to share some of Patrisse’s words from the pages she wrote.
Because my words and thoughts are not what matters most here….
Hers are.
“Days after the elections of 2016, asha sent me a link to a talk by
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says
to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We
listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and
molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of
stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas
clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right
mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our
own, but also people, including us, me and her. He is saying that not
only are we in the universe, but that the universe is in us. He is saying
that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.
And I know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is
telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic,
the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.
I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah’s Witness and a
woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping
other people’s children, working the reception desks at gyms,
telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the
whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My
mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the
children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother,
never giving up despite never making a living wage.
I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun
country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world
that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My
father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a
version of himself there were no mirrors for.
And I knew it because I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a
people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the
whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human
beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their
languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and
beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families
snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this
built language and honored God and created movement and upheld
love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to
die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that
their children’s lives did not matter?”
“Later, when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport?”
“We know that if we can get the nation to see, say and understand that Black Lives Matter, then every life would stand a chance. Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human. Which is not to erase any group’s harm to ongoing pain-in particular the genocide carried out against the First Nations peoples. But it is to say that there is something quite basic that has to be addressed in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that Black people are not fully human.”
“We actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. We care about justice.”
“I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone a murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights, and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school–all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?”
“What is the impact of not being valued?
How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?”