When They Call You a Terrorist Major and Minor Quotes

“I was not expected or encouraged to survive.” (Introduction, “We Are Stardust”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: When Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that she was not expected or encouraged to survive, she is referring to the systemic inequality that Black people face in America. More than that, Patrisse grows up in a poor, disadvantaged neighborhood lacking amenities like parks, youth centers, and even a grocery store. The combination of racism and poverty that Patrisse faces means she must work harder to succeed within a society that largely considers her an afterthought. Experiences throughout her young life show how Black people are written off and disposed of. The entire impetus for Black Lives Matter, which she later cofounds, comes from the way Black people are murdered without consequence, hence the reason they are not expected to survive. She suggests that a racist system that purposefully creates impediments to Black success discourages Black people’s survival.

The concept of survival is important to Patrisse. When she rejects the accusation of being a “terrorist,” she responds that she identifies as a “survivor” of the various forms of terrorism wielded by anti-Black forces in the United States. Yet despite being discouraged, Patrisse continues to struggle for the survival of all other Black people as well as herself. Her survival and that of her family members are not the results of individual determination, however, but of sticking together and supporting each other through hardship and adversity.

“You will always be ours.” (Chapter 3, “Bloodlines”)

—Paul Cullors

Analysis: Paul Cullors says this to his sister Patrisse after she learns she is the child of a different father, Gabriel Brignac. Before Patrisse meets Gabriel and learns what a kind, nurturing, and loving man he is, she is apprehensive. At only 12 years old, she finds her world has suddenly turned on its head, and she fears losing the only family she has ever known. She has a fight with her mother that ends with her mother slapping her. Paul steps in and deescalates the situation while also comforting Patrisse. By saying these words, Paul alleviates Patrisse’s fears that she will lose anything by acknowledging Gabriel as her biological father and reinforces the importance of family supporting each other. He also echoes Alton Cullors’s earlier words to Patrisse, when Alton declared he never wanted Patrisse to be “half” his daughter or “step-anything.” These gestures and remarks show that family is more than blood, deriving its power from close community, trust, and love. Throughout the memoir, Patrisse engages in nontraditional relationships and creates various communities around herself. This moment is an important step to her conceiving of a nonrestrictive, non-blood-based model of family.

“Kids were . . . sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us.” (Chapter 4, “Magnitude and Bond”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: From an early age, Patrisse sees her brothers mistreated by police. In their poor neighborhood, police maintain a strong and constant presence, intimidating and harassing young Black men without need for justification. The police thus act more like an occupying army than the protective force they are meant to be. As a result, Black people in Van Nuys and similar communities experience a siege mentality that feels much like war. The state of affairs in which young Black men around Patrisse, including her brother Monte, are arrested and sent to prison for minor offenses only hardens those young men. Ironically, by banding together and acting tough to protect themselves, they only make it easier for the police to enforce gang statutes to oppress and victimize them. These statutes allow police to arrest and charge Black boys and men for a wide range of activities, many completely harmless.

The war that Patrisse references is not only the violence with which police threaten Black people on the streets, but it is also a larger conflict in American society and culture. She describes how mass media depictions of young Black men as “super-predators” have biased the American public against poor Black people and in support of the police’s harsh, discriminatory practices. Years later, one of the goals of Black Lives Matter will be to disprove these myths and shed light on this undeclared war against Black people and Black lives.

“We talk about how Black people’s relationships are too often defined by harm.” (Chapter 7, “All the Bones We Could Find”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: One of the most important relationships in the memoir is that between Patrisse and her biological father, Gabriel Brignac. Part of its importance is how Gabriel’s struggle against his addiction inspires Patrisse to become a community organizer and activist. Although their interpretations of what “accountability” means diverge as Patrisse ages and comes to see the shortcomings of Gabriel’s 12-step program, they agree that accountability is important. To Gabriel, accountability means the individual accepting responsibility for their own actions and future, while Patrisse views accountability as something societal and communal. Patrisse says these words after she reconnects with Gabriel and after he has fallen back into his drug habit. Although Gabriel may have been taught by the 12-step program to see his addiction as a personal struggle, Patrisse tries to push him to see that it is part of a larger, societal problem and tied to issues like racism and intergenerational trauma.

Many of Patrisse’s relationships in the memoir contain or are touched by various traumas. Her relationships with Gabriel and her brother Monte are both characterized by personal struggles (drugs for Gabriel, mental illness for Monte) exacerbated by multiple incarcerations. Harm also comes from within Black spaces, even within families, as shown by Patrisse’s cousin Naomi being physically abused by her mother after coming out as queer. However, harm is not the only factor in these relationships, and the memoir shows how they are also rooted in love, trust, and mutual support. Gabriel is a good example of this, readily accepting his daughter’s queer identity, while she doesn’t judge him for his addiction.

“If my father could not be possible in this America, then how is . . . such a thing as America . . . possible?” (Chapter 7, “All the Bones We Could Find”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: The sudden, shocking death of Gabriel Brignac after a heart attack devastates Patrisse and leaves her both anguished and furious. In her grief, she has trouble accepting that he is gone forever, and so she questions how it is possible that the world or the country she lives in can exist when his existence has ended. The question also alludes to American values and supposed qualities and how they fail to cohere to Patrisse’s actual experiences with them. The United States of America is supposedly a country in which people are free and taken care of, but for most of Gabriel’s life neither was true. Gabriel serves his country first as a soldier and then as a firefighter while in prison, but he is not served in turn. Rather he is used as convict labor while imprisoned and then left to take care of himself after his release. Although he is given full military honors at his funeral, Patrisse sees the hypocrisy of the military claiming him in death after doing nothing to help him while he lived and struggled. Gabriel’s death is one of many events that help inspire Patrisse to create Black Lives Matter, to affirm the value and dignity of lives like his.

“If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.” (Chapter 8, “Zero Dark Thirty: The Remix”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: Patrisse reflects on how her brother Monte is rescued from his mental illness due to the compassion and love and support of family, friends, and herself. When Monte is suffering a bad mental health episode, Patrisse, with the help of Mark Anthony, Paul, and some other friends, manages to get him under control peacefully and then reason with him. They do not overpower him or force him to calm down, but rather they show patience and understanding. One of the important moments in this process is Mark Anthony agreeing to perform 10 pull-ups in exchange for Monte agreeing to let them take him to the hospital. Monte asks Mark Anthony to do something difficult for him (a strenuous physical exercise) and in return agrees to face his own fears and go to the hospital. Patrisse comments that this kind of compassionate, vulnerable exchange and show of support is what the love of Black men should look like. Furthermore, if Black people in America are to overcome the trauma of the past and their ongoing oppression, they must be able to rely on and care for one another.

“You could see parts of me others could not. Parts I wasn’t ready for the world to see.” (Chapter 9, “No Ordinary Love”)

—Mark Anthony 

Analysis: When Mark Anthony and Patrisse Khan-Cullors first become friends, their relationship is strictly platonic. However, Patrisse soon is surprised to find she is attracted to him, a straight man, despite her previously strict preferences for queer people. The relationship as it develops becomes steadily more intense as she gets past her concerns, but then Mark Anthony suddenly stops communicating, ghosting her. Through a mutual friend, Patrisse sends him a letter in red ink, and a few days later he calls her and admits he was afraid of being vulnerable. When he says he was afraid of her seeing parts of him he wasn’t ready for the world to see, he means he was afraid of being emotionally vulnerable.

Although Mark Anthony is represented as a sensitive, emotionally attuned, and mostly wholesome male figure in Patrisse’s life, this moment shows he is still susceptible to traditional patriarchal prejudices. Patrisse accuses him of not being emotionally available, while Mark Anthony explains he doesn’t want “people to know how things hurt me, where they hurt me.” Mark Anthony’s struggle with being more emotionally vulnerable mirrors the struggle of Patrisse’s brother Monte, who has trouble accepting help or advice from his sister and prefers the company of men, even though men like the police and other prisoners have done him the most harm. Mark Anthony’s difficulties also foreshadow the similar disconnect that later occurs between Patrisse and her son’s father, JT, who closes himself off to her emotionally just as she discovers her pregnancy. JT’s inability to share his grief with Patrisse—his inability to be emotionally available—ends their relationship.

“Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?” (Chapter 11, “Black Lives Matter”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors 

Analysis: With this remark, Patrisse Khan-Cullors criticizes how the supposed “representatives” of the people are not protecting their constituents from racist violence. In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman and the inaction of police and politicians, activists like Patrisse take matters into their own hands, protesting and organizing to advocate for action. The politicians who Patrisse complains do nothing as “white guys [shoot Black people] down” are the same politicians, in Patrisse’s eyes, responsible for many of the discriminatory policies that persecute Black people. She complains that these politicians turn inner city schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and heavy police presence, yet when Black people are murdered, the politicians look the other way. Patrisse also points out the hypocrisy in how crimes and responsibility are assessed: when a person in her community commits a crime, the whole community is held responsible; yet when Trayvon Martin is murdered, his killer is left unpunished. Crimes by Black people are punished harshly, while crimes against Black people are ignored. This discrepancy suggests that Black and white lives are held to different standards and valued differently, which is the basis for the Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse helps found.

“There are people close to us who . . . worr[y] that the . . . term, Black Lives Matter, is too radical.” (Chapter 13, “A Call, A Response”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Analysis: One of the core motives for Patrisse Khan-Cullors writing When They Call You a Terrorist is to defend the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the book’s foreword, activist and academic Angela Davis (born 1944) argues that the harsh reaction from many Americans toward the phrase “Black Lives Matter” shows how those simple words have challenged Americans’ attitudes toward race relations. When Patrisse comments on how some allies express concern that “Black Lives Matter” is too radical, she argues that a movement aimed at combatting intolerance and racism must first reform those aligned to its aims. She calls for a “wholesale cultural shift” beginning within the progressive movement.

Apart from calling for greater commitment to change society, Khan-Cullors wants radical actions. In her mind, concerns that “Black Lives Matter” might be too radical a term only play the game of their opponents, those committed to maintaining the systems of oppression. She also decries how the media tend to ignore the initial provocation (the murder of Black people) and condemn instead the reaction (disruptive protests). Additionally, she excoriates the media’s tendency to ignore thousands of peaceful protestors while focusing on “one or two who are not peaceful,” while “wholly ignor[ing] law enforcement, who attack everyone.” She agrees that Black Lives Matter may be a “radical” term but that radical action is necessary to counter extraordinary problems like racism.

“So there is no other place for me to be but here.” (Chapter 16, “When They Call You a Terrorist”)

—Patrisse Khan-Cullors  

Analysis: In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the presidential election, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her fellow activists are disheartened and frightened. Patrisse even considers leaving the country and going to live in Canada with her Canadian partner, Future. However, although living in a relatively less toxic environment under a less hostile political leadership is appealing, Patrisse resolves to stay in America. She chooses to keep fighting for her principles and beliefs, despite organizers like her being murdered and labeled terrorists and despite Trump’s election victory revealing the depth and power of embedded racism and misogyny in American society.

Additionally, this remark reveals how Patrisse, while critical of many aspects of American society, still identifies as American. America is her home, the people she loves and cares about live in America, and a better America means a better life for them and everyone else. Patrisse refuses to emigrate, even if it would be safer and easier for her, because she can fight for a better future for the country only if she remains there. Future agrees with Patrisse’s logic and stays with Patrisse, even though it would be easy for them to leave and return to Canada. Patrisse’s commitment to remaining and keeping up the fight shows she is more concerned about the collective future of those she cares about than her personal safety.