When They Call You a Terrorist

Monte is one of Cullors’s two older brothers. Though physically imposing, Monte is habitually nonviolent; Cullors cannot recall having seen or heard about any acts of violence ever committed by him. Nevertheless, he is continually targeted by the police and frequently arrested for small-time offenses, some of which are innocent.

As Monte grows into young adulthood, he shows signs of schizoaffective disorder. The mood swings caused by this condition are exacerbated by his use of crack cocaine. Monte’s manic episodes lead to a pair of felony arrests that threaten to send him to prison on a life sentence, even though neither of the incidents in question were violent in nature.

For Cullors, Monte’s struggle reflects the pain and suffering visited upon Black men and women in low-income neighborhoods at every stage of development, particularly during the War on Drugs. As a youth, Monte is harassed by cops who are empowered by draconian drug laws and controversial gang injunctions. In young adulthood, he is arrested and tortured in county jails, despite never having committed a violent offense. Upon reentry, he struggles to obtain employment or secure housing because of his felony conviction. With so little support at his disposal, he is eventually reincarcerated and subjected anew to the depredations of the LA County Jail. In Cullors’s telling, while Monte’s story is extraordinary in its inhumanity, it is also depressingly representative of other young Black men his age, particularly those with mental illnesses.

Gabriel is Cullors’s biological father whom she meets at the age of 12. A Louisiana transplant, Gabriel fights a lifelong battle with cocaine addiction. When Cullors meets him, he is sober after completing a prison sentence on drug charges. He remains so for three years before relapsing and returning to prison. This cycle repeats until his death at the age of 50.

Gabriel’s role in Cullors’s narrative is to show how the rhetoric surrounding the War on Drugs and 12-step programs places too much emphasis on personal responsibility, as opposed to the systemic racial and economic inequities that contribute to addiction. For Gabriel’s part, he rejects this perspective and takes full responsibility for his actions. As such, his attitude reflects another issue Cullors explores at length: the personal guilt and shame engendered by systems of oppression.

Mark Anthony is Cullors’s partner for most of the book. He is one of only two cisgender men she has ever dated. Tall and handsome, Mark Anthony meets Cullors at a screening she organizes in high school of the 2000 Spike Lee film Bamboozled. Shattered by its portrayal of racist imagery across film and television history, Mark Anthony is comforted by Cullors after the rest of the students leave the room. Although his relationship with Cullors is only sporadically physical, they share a deep emotional bond that outlives their romantic partnership, which ends sometime after 2014 amid the exponential growth of Black Lives Matter. A healer by trade and by nature, Mark Anthony represents to Cullors the compassion and strength needed for communities to police themselves. These qualities are displayed most dramatically when Mark Anthony deescalates Monte’s manic episode at Cynthia’s before convincing Monte to admit himself to a psychiatric hospital.