When They Call You a Terrorist

“The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know.” 

Cullors details how the US government and the media spent much of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s shaping popular perceptions of criminality around Blackness. Scholarship shows that this was part of a concerted propaganda effort by the Reagan and Bush administrations to manipulate racial animus and carve out a new coalition of voters who implicitly or explicitly opposed Black empowerment. This had grievous consequences, particularly for Black urban communities that became ground zero for the War on Drugs.

“For a long time, I see them, the police in their cars, but I do not understand them, what role they play in the neighborhood. They do not speak to us or help guide us across streets. They are never friendly. It is clear not only that they are not our friends, but that they do not like us very much.” 

The impact of racial biases in law enforcement is particularly catastrophic on Black youths like Cullors. Her struggle to understand the purpose of the police presence in her neighborhood reflects a perversion of law enforcement’s stated duty: to serve and protect. Cullors feels neither served nor protected by the police. Moreover, her most memorable observation of the police comes when she sees Monte and Paul roughly frisked and effectively sexually assaulted by a police officer.

“One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.” 

This quote comes from the dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey. It is used to introduce the chapter on Cullors’s 12th year—the year Cullors and other young Black boys and girls are no longer viewed as children. Rather, they are henceforth viewed by much of society as either threats or things to be discarded. Following Cullors’s view to its logical conclusion, Black children are effectively deprived of one whole third of their childhood compared to White children.

“I am 12 and I will not connect his disappearance from us to any larger social or structural disruption but only to the idea that we, the kids, must have done something wrong to make this big, loving man go away.” 

Another way racism harms young children is that while Black children are sheltered from the knowledge of systemic and structural injustice, they acutely experience the lasting effects of that injustice. Cullors doesn’t know that Alvin is one of millions of Black men who lost their job because manufacturing shifted to the suburbs and overseas. She doesn’t know that hiring prejudices will make it that much more difficult for Black men like Alvin to find a new job that will support his family. Instead, Cullors is left only with his absence which, in lieu of explanation, she attributes to herself and her siblings.

“We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out. We are the post-Reagan, post-social safety net generation. The welfare reform generation. The swim or motherfucking sink generation. And, unlike our counterparts on Wall Street, where crack is used and sold more, we don’t have an employee assistance plan.”

While the US government did not intentionally flood urban Black neighborhoods with crack cocaine, Cullors argues that it created conditions of desperation that allowed crack to thrive. The hollowing-out of the social safety net under President Reagan hit Black communities particularly hard, leading to depression and a lack of economic opportunity, both of which fueled the sales and use of crack cocaine. With few economic opportunities, a relatively cheap drug that makes a person feel good for a brief period of time has a strong allure that many individuals in these communities sadly could not resist.

“As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.” 

Cullors is strongly ambivalent about 12-step programs. On one hand, Gabriel experiences a profound spiritual connection in 12-step programs that fueled him to remain clean for years. Yet he consistently relapses, in part because he is forced to fight his addiction amid profound racial and income inequality. Cullors’s feelings about 12-step programs are shared by scholars like Lisa Betty, who view organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous as insufficient—at least in isolation—for Black men and women in recovery.

“And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening. I don’t even learn—although I guess—that he is reincarcerated on a drug charge. But I don’t ask. I don’t know to ask.” 

Numerous works of scholarship argue that the pain felt by family members of the incarcerated are frequently experienced in shame and silence. Many attribute this to the fact that one of the primary support systems in Black communities—the church—can tend to embrace a misguided false binary between “good” churchgoing Black men and “bad” Black criminals. Moreover, while there are all sorts of support groups for countless other traumas, few are devoted to the trauma of losing a loved one to the system of mass incarceration.

“In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising.”

Cullors’s invocation of Nelson Mandela is important in that he too was frequently called a terrorist by his own government and other governments. In fact, Mandela was on US terrorist watch groups as late as 2008. Cullors also aims here to draw a connection between Apartheid conditions in South Africa and the United States’ treatment of Black men and women, particularly at the height of the War on Drugs. In both cases, Cullors argues, a system of state-sanctioned White supremacy governs the lives of Black individuals, albeit more implicitly in the United States.

“A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang. And it was mostly boys rounded up in those years. Boys, the initial wide swath of collateral damage in the war on gangs, the war on drugs, both of these names code for round up all the n*****s you can.” 

Repeatedly, Cullors highlights the absurdity of Los Angeles’s gang injunctions, which according to the ACLU criminalized otherwise legal behavior. Monte experiences this firsthand when he is arrested for wearing the same T-shirt as his friend, which suggests to a cop that the two are in a gang. While the injunctions allow for loose definitions of who constitutes a gang member, in practice Cullors believes that only one thing designates that a person is in a gang as far as the police are concerned: Black skin.

“Columbine hasn't happened yet so we don't yet have the bars and the metal detectors. Because that's what happened in the wake of the horrific school shooting in a town that was mostly white in a school that was mostly white. Black and Brown kids across the country got police in their schools, complete with drug-sniffing dogs, bars on the windows and metal detectors.” 

This is one of many disparities Cullors cites between how White communities and Black communities experience punitive and preventative measures. As much as Black individuals are incarcerated on drug charges at greater rates than White individuals—despite Whites selling and using drugs at essentially equal rates—Black schools became the target of severe law enforcement measures after the Columbine shooting, even though it took place in a White suburban school. According to Cullors, these measures helped create the school-to-prison pipeline that makes youths more likely to be incarcerated because of draconian school and municipal policies enforced against them.

“In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life.” 

This is consistent with what scholars like Michelle Alexander call the “prison label.” In effect, a felony conviction can disadvantage and disenfranchise an individual for the rest of his or her life. For Monte, that means he is forced to live under untenable conditions with Cynthia because he fears jeopardizing his mother’s Section 8 housing. As a result, he fails to consistently take his medication and thus suffers frequent episodes, any one of which could land him back in prison or worse. Moreover, his felony record makes it prohibitively difficult to obtain employment.

“What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?” 

This reflects the extent to which criminal justice reform is intertwined with a host of other progressive issues, including universal healthcare. To Cullors, it is a monumental hypocrisy that the American pharmaceutical industry cares more about producing drugs used in executions than about making essential medications available and affordable to most Americans. Moreover, the lack of affordable healthcare, particularly in low-income Black communities, is why Monte’s condition goes undiagnosed for so long. Had he started taking medication earlier in life, he might never have been arrested. 

“[M]y mother accesses the only feeling she’d ever been allowed to access freely. Guilt. Guilt for having a baby young. Guilt for not blindly following patriarchal religious protocols. Guilt for being poor. Guilt for not keeping mental illness out of her son’s brain. Guilt that she could not stop a group of people from divorcing themselves from a useful definition of humanity. Guilt that she could not keep these moral monsters from harming her baby.” 

One of the most tragic and persistent threads in Cullors’s narrative is the extent to which victims of systemic injustice blame themselves for their suffering. This is seen as early as Cullors’s childhood when she blames herself for Alvin leaving, even though Alvin faced economic pressures because of broader societal factors. What’s even worse is that in many communities of color, feelings of guilt and shame are generally internalized rather than shared in formal or informal support groups.

“We have navigated this situation with no police involvement. And that night, before I drift off to sleep laying next to Mark Anthony, I think: this is what community control looks like. This is what the love of Black men looks like. This is what our Black yesterday once looked like. And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.” 

The resolution of Monte’s episode at Cynthia’s provides a blueprint of a post-police America, for which Cullors advocates. Shy of abolishing the police, Cullors makes a case that mental health crises should be addressed by mental health professionals, as opposed to the police. The city of Eugene, Oregon has successfully adopted this model, sending medics and crisis workers to answer 911 calls related to drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illnesses.

“At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm.” 

Here, Cullors captures the transition between Jim Crow and the era of mass incarceration. She contends that by not addressing the intractable racism at the heart of Jim Crow, a new system of racial oppression easily emerged to take its place. Moreover, Cullors believes that the injustice of the War of Drugs is compounded by the fact that the United States already held an enormous outstanding debt to Black Americans, which it continues to refuse to pay.

“This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.”

This is among the starkest examples of the hypocrisy Cullors seeks to emphasize surrounding the word “terrorism.” The War in Iraq was billed to the American people as a war against terrorism. Yet the tactics used at Abu Ghraib—rape, torture, humiliation—constitute a form of state terrorism committed by representatives of the US military. Despite America’s rightful outrage at the revelations surrounding Abu Ghraib, Cullors doesn’t see similar outrage when these abuses are directed at Black men and women on US soil.

“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 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?”

A consistent theme throughout the book is the extent to which Black communities are forced to suffer for the actions of those communities’ very worst representatives. Cullors observes a clear divide between how Black criminality is politicized to reflect on Black America as a whole, versus how White criminality is viewed as anomalous and unusual. This divide is galling with respect to the Columbine shooting. According to Cullors, this tragedy, despite taking place in a suburban White community, gave local politicians an excuse to transform Black schools so that they resemble prisons more and more.

“Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought.” 

Cullors is sensitive to the word “founding,” which in a mainstream historical context implies a significant achievement. This is most evident in Americans’ lionization and mythologizing of the Founding Fathers. Yet Cullors contends that when people talk about the founding of a town or even a nation, they typically refer to incidents in which White people take a piece of land by force, displacing or outright murdering its inhabitants. To Cullors, the fact that Susanville is today a prison town that thrives on the incarceration of predominantly non-White bodies provides a thread connecting the past and present.

“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.” 

Here, Cullors presents her clearest argument against catchphrases like “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter,” both of which emerged as rejoinders to the Black Lives Matter movement. On the surface, there is nothing controversial about asserting the dignity and value of a human life without qualification. Yet Cullors’s point is that the phrase “All Lives Matter” essentially expresses that there is nothing special about Black suffering, a notion her book exists to repudiate. Moreover, she believes that “Black Lives Matter” must be communicated explicitly because so much of America’s popular and institutional culture suggests that Black lives do not matter. 

“Years later a friend, a veteran organizer, will ask me about security for the march, how we ensured our protection. She will weep when she hears my answer: we didn't think about that.” 

Cullors expresses the naiveté of believing that the peaceful demonstrations she organizes on behalf of Black lives won’t come under threat of violence, either by individuals or state actors. At the start of her journey, the days when Alabama state troopers cracked the skulls of peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge seem distant. She is disabused of this naiveté during the Ferguson protests, when police in full riot gear use tear gas, rubber bullets, and tanks against demonstrators.

“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. And if few were willing to accept this before—the American Movement Against Black Lives—August 9, 2014, changed that.”

Cullors argues that, before the Ferguson protests and the death of Michael Brown, it was easy for White Americans and even some Black Americans to believe that the United States had entered into a post-racial era of colorblindness. The US elected a Black president, and in general the most overt displays of racism were routinely denounced in all mainstream corners of society. Yet to Cullors, the Ferguson protests revealed that these racial fault lines never went away. That the fault lines were ignored for so long only made the eventual shockwaves they caused more severe.

“The National Guard is there. There are tanks on street corners. Even Los Angeles with its constant cop drive-bys and helicopters does not prepare me for this. My God, I think. All the money put in to suppress a community. We'd need far less to ensure it thrived.” 

The use of expensive military equipment against American citizens is an outrage to Cullors in and of itself. Even more unjust is the fact that the funds used to buy those tanks could have been put into the very communities now under assault, providing better schools and other resources. This idea is central to the argument to defund or divest from the police. Proponents of this argument believe that the best way to reduce crime is to invest in communities, rather than aggressively police them.

“Women, all women, Trans-women, are roughly 80 percent of the people who are standing down the face of terror in Ferguson, saying We are the caretakers of this community. It is women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying We have a right to raise our children without fear. But it's not women's courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says, when the police move in, we do not run. We stay. And for this, we deserve recognition.” 

The erasure of women from narratives pertaining to social justice movements is a serious matter to Cullors. It also presents her with a conundrum. On one hand, Cullors is loath to center herself and her cofounders in the fight against police brutality and racial injustice; the last thing she wants to do is turn Black Lives Matter into a cult of personality. Moreover, Black Lives Matter is decentralized by design to allow local chapter leaders significant autonomy. Yet if she steps out of the spotlight, Cullors misses an opportunity to show how important women are to the movement.