When They Call You a Terrorist

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Introduction-Chapter 3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-16

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “All the Bones We Could Find”

Chapter 4 Summary: “Magnitude and Bond”

By the time Monte is a teenager, he already exhibits signs of schizoaffective disorder. He also begins to use crack cocaine, exacerbating the emotional highs and lows of his condition. From the age of 12, he is frequently arrested for several minor infractions, including tagging, underage drinking, cutting class, and even wearing the same T-shirt as his friend. The basis for the T-shirt arrest comes from California’s 1990s-era gang injunctions that, according to the ACLU, criminalized several otherwise normal and legal activities.

At 19, Monte is arrested for attempted robbery, meaning he will serve “real prison time” (59). During a schizoaffective episode, Monte tries to enter somebody’s home through the window. Although no one is hurt and nothing is stolen, Monte faces a six-year prison sentence. After his arrest, he is in jail for two months before Cherice can locate him. When she does, he is covered with bruises and has lost 40 pounds. He is also drugged to the point of near-incoherence. By this point, the jail psychiatrist has diagnosed Monte with schizoaffective disorder, yet this diagnosis is withheld from his family. Only later does Cullors learn that the sheriffs at the LA County Jail are responsible for beating him.

Soon after his arrival in prison, a Mexican gang member stabs Monte. Cullors writes, “My Black brother who had grown up around Mexicans and sought to identify with them behind the wall, finds that in prison the lines are different” (60). Rather than join a Black prison gang for protection, Monte waits out his sentence in a mental health unit. Citing data from the Washington Post, Cullors writes, “There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up” (61).

In 2003, roughly four years after his arrest, Monte is released. Cullors, two years removed from her high school graduation, rides with her friend Carla to pick Monte up from the bus station. He is in the same clothes he wore when he was arrested: only a thin T-shirt and boxer shorts. The doctors clearly did not stabilize Monte before his release, given that he is in a “full-blown episode” (64). Cullors is certain that had she not been there to pick him up, he would have been back in jail within hours.

After four days of increasingly erratic behavior, Cullors calls the local hospital. Given that Monte is a convicted felon, the hospital won’t send an ambulance unless the police are involved. With great reluctance, Cullors calls the police. One of the two young rookie officers who answers the call tells a mortified Cullors not to worry—if Monte can’t be managed, the officers will simply tase him. After begging the officers to promise not to hurt Monte, she lets them inside the home. Upon seeing the officers, Monte bursts into tears, repeating the words, “Please don’t take me back” (66). Ashamed of her failure to consider how Monte would react to seeing the police, Cullors promptly sends the officers away. Later that day, Cherice’s boyfriend Bernard finally convinces Monte to admit himself to a psychiatric hospital for a three-week stay.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Witness”

When Cullors is in the ninth grade, the Jehovah’s Witness Elders at the local Kingdom Hall finally allow Cherice to officially rejoin the congregation. Since her pregnancy at age 15, Cherice was only allowed to pray at Kingdom Hall; she was not allowed to join in fellowship nor even speak to other members of the congregation, aside from the Elders. Cullors contrasts these judgmental, patriarchal attitudes with the grace and forgiveness afforded to Gabriel in his faith-based recovery programs. While Cherice is thrilled by the Elders’ decision, Cullors—unable to “bear witness to this vulgar hypocrisy” (73)—excuses herself during the ceremony.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Out in the World”

Although Cullors always knew she wasn’t straight, it isn’t until high school that she fully embraces her queer identity. During her time at Cleveland High School, a charter school devoted to the arts and social justice, Cullors is one of 20 girls of color to come out as LGBTQ+. Compared to most schools near her home, Cleveland High is a paradise. There are no metal detectors, bars on the windows, drug-sniffing dogs, nor any of the other law enforcement mechanisms installed in schools after the 1999 Columbine shooting. Although Columbine happened in a majority-White school, Cullors writes that majority-Black and Latinx schools bore the brunt of post-Columbine “protections” that effectively criminalize students and perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline.

In her senior year, Cullors falls in love with a classmate named Mark Anthony. He is the first cisgender male toward whom she’s ever had feelings. Upon acknowledging these feelings, Cullors begins to identify as bisexual.

After Cherice is evicted because the building’s owners want to sell the property, the family packs into Bernard’s wheelchair-bound mother’s one-bedroom apartment. With so little room for five people, Cullors decides to live on the streets with her friend Carla. They sleep at friends’ houses or in cars until their art history teacher, Donna Hill, invites them into her home shortly after their graduation. Cullors and Carla live there for two years, a period during which Cullors works at Rite-Aid and as a dance instructor.

Chapter 7 Summary: “All the Bones We Could Find”

At a social justice camp Cullors hears about from Donna, she meets Kikanza Ramsey, the lead organizer at the Strategy Center, a race-conscious labor organization. Shortly thereafter, Kikanza hires Cullors and trains her to be a community organizer.

When Cullors is 20, Gabriel is released from prison. Here, Cullors details more of Gabriel’s personal history. To support his grandmother, he enlisted in the military and served in Korea and Panama, where Cullors believes he picked up his cocaine habit. In 1984, he returned to Los Angeles, which Cullors describes as a “city under siege” where Black unemployment is near the levels of Apartheid-era South Africa. Like many Black veterans, Gabriel saw fewer of the benefits of the GI Bill than his White counterparts. With little legitimate work available to Black residents of Los Angeles, Gabriel turned to underground drug markets. While Cullors argues that racist systems and policies are equally responsible—if not more so—for her father’s struggles as his personal decisions are, Gabriel is unconvinced.

In the present, Gabriel gets a job as a cement truck driver. He maintains his sobriety for three years before disappearing again. When Cullors finds him in a rundown motel days later, she learns that he was arrested again, presumably on drug charges. In the motel, Cullors’s “precious father is high […] and drunk” (97), she writes. While it is excruciating to see Gabriel this way, Cullors does not judge him.

Facing a seven-year prison sentence, Gabriel accepts a three-year plea deal that lands him in a fire prison camp responsible for fighting California wildfires. Upon his release three years later in 2009, Gabriel enrolls at Pierce College to pursue credentials as an alcohol and substance abuse counselor. Shortly after Christmas of that year, Gabriel dies of a heart attack at the age of 50. While Cullors acknowledges the toll that cocaine abuse took on his health, she also places much of the blame for his death on the dehumanization he suffered in and out of prison. Even in the face of this dehumanization, Cullors writes, “My father kept fucking trying. This man. My father. Gabriel Brignac who loved me deeply and fiercely. Who spent every moment with me telling me how my Black life mattered” (108).

Part 1, Chapters 4-7 Analysis

In these chapters, Cullors introduces the first of many troubling anecdotes related to how the police handle mental health crises like Monte’s. Rather than work to mollify an individual in the midst of a schizoaffective episode, the police escalate the situation by arresting Monte, beating him, and drugging him with medication designed to “incapacitate his humanity” (60), writes Cullors. This all transpires even though Monte has no history of violence, nor does he pose any violent threat to either bystanders or the arresting officers.

Given the recent history of police altercations with individuals with mental illnesses, Monte could be considered one of the luckier cases, despite the inhumane treatment he receives. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, between 25 and 50% of all victims of fatal police shootings in the United States had histories of mental illnesses. (Fuller, Doris A., H. Richard Lamb, Michael Biasotti, and John Snook. “Overlooked and Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters.” Treatment Advocacy Center. Dec. 2015. https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/overlooked-in-the-undercounted.pdf.) The list of individuals in a mental health crisis—particularly men and women of color—who have died at the hands of police officers is long and despairing. Often these incidents begin with a call to 911 for a routine “welfare check,” writes Shaun King of The Intercept. (King, Shaun. “If You Are Black and in a Mental Health Crisis, 911 Can Be a Death Sentence.” The Intercept. 19 Sep. 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/09/29/police-shootings-mental-health/.)

This was the case for Osaze Osagie. Osagie was a 29-year-old resident of State College, Pennsylvania who was hospitalized for schizophrenia on multiple occasions. After his father called the police to perform a wellness check, the situation ended with the officers shooting Osagie after claiming he had a knife. In March 2015, outside Atlanta, a woman called 911 requesting medical help for her neighbor, US Army veteran Anthony Hill, whom she saw frantically running around their apartment building naked, asking for his medicine. Instead of sending EMTs, the police department dispatched Officer Robert Olsen who shot the unarmed and still-naked Hill; Olson was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the shooting. In another incident involving a naked victim with mental health issues, NYPD Officer Hugh Barry shot and killed Deborah Danner in her apartment. Barry, who claimed that Danner was armed with a baseball bat, was acquitted of murder charges. In 2020, Daniel Prude, while in the midst of a mental health crisis caused by ingesting PCP, died after a Rochester, New York police officer forced his body weight onto Prude’s head for several minutes.

These incidents, along with Monte’s experiences, reflect how police involvement in mental health crises can frequently end tragically. For this reason, many activists are calling for funds to be diverted from traditional policing to mental health task forces who answer 911 calls related to mental health crises. This reform is at the heart of many calls to defund or restructure police departments across the country in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd. Already in Eugene, Oregon, a city of 170,000 people, a team of medics and mental health counselors known as CAHOOTS exists to respond to calls related to homelessness, suicide attempts, substance abuse, and other mental health issues. In 2019, CAHOOTS responded to 20% of the city’s 911 calls, according to CNN. (Andrew, Scottie. “This town of 170,000 replaced some cops with medics and mental health workers.” CNN. 5 Jul. 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/us/cahoots-replace-police-mental-health-trnd/index.html.)

While on numerous subjects Cullors is steadfast in her convictions, her relationship with Gabriel inspires ambivalent feelings about drug addiction. On one hand, she worries that the focus 12-step programs place on individual responsibility masks broader systemic pressures. She writes, “Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police” (41). Yet when Gabriel relapses and returns to prison, Cullors can’t help but feel that he “chose drugs over me” (143). Ashamed of this feeling, Cullors attributes it to the propaganda of the War on Drugs, which centers personal responsibility as opposed to societal responsibility in discussions of addiction.

The inadequacies of 12-step programs for people of color is a focus of study for activist and historian Lisa Betty. In discussion with journalist Jessica Hoppe, Betty says that the Western Puritanical modes of recovery championed by groups like Alcoholics Anonymous can feel unfamiliar and unnatural to people of color. While she doesn’t dismiss 12-step programs outright, she recommends “supplementing participation in AA with a cultural healing practice that is indigenous to their community” (Hoppe, Jessica. “The First Step to Recovery is Admitting You are Not Powerless Over Your Privilege.” GEN. 6 Jul. 2020. https://gen.medium.com/the-first-step-to-recovery-is-admitting-you-are-not-powerless-over-your-privilege-1976a2b1a71a.)

Finally, these chapters examine the consequences of California’s anti-gang injunctions. Cullors shares the ACLU’s opinion that “[g]ang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities—such as riding the bus with a friend or picking a spouse up from work late at night—illegal for people they target” (57). This is true of Monte, who at one point is arrested for wearing the same T-shirt as a friend, which the police assume signifies a shared gang affiliation. Thus, these gang injunctions work in concert with the War on Drugs as part of the broader pattern Cullors identifies concerning the criminalization of young Black males.

Moreover, Cullors contends that the gang injunctions, aside from causing racially disproportionate outcomes, were ineffective at reducing violent crime. This, however, is only partially supported by the data. The results of studies related to the effectiveness of California’s gang injunctions vary. While numerous criminal justice scholars measure violent crime reductions due to gang injunctions at rates between 5 and 10%, the legal scholar Thomas A. Myers found that location-specific injunctions tend only to divert violent crime and gang activity to other nearby areas. (Myers, Thomas A. “The Unconstitutionality, Ineffectiveness, and Alternatives of Gang Injunctions.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 14(2). 2008.) This mixed data notwithstanding, Cullors argues that had the millions of dollars spent on anti-gang task forces been diverted to better schools and community resources, violent crime would have plummeted in neighborhoods across Los Angeles.