When They Call You a Terrorist

In her Introduction, Cullors discusses one of the key focal points of her book: what Americans mean when they use the word “terrorist” in a variety of different contexts. For Cullors, the term is personal, given that she and her fellow leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are labeled “terrorists” after Micah Johnson’s murder of five Dallas police officers at a racial justice demonstration. As Cullors points out, the effort to discredit Black Lives Matter on the basis of one extremist with no ties to the movement is unsupportable. It is also predictable. By allowing or encouraging the branding of political opponents as terrorists—no matter how tenuous the basis for these claims—officials have long granted cover to bodies like the FBI to investigate activist groups as threats to national security.

For example, as early as 1919—a mere eight years following its inception—the organization that would become the FBI sought to discredit the Jamaican-American political activist Marcus Garvey for “agitating the Negro movement.” (Hoover, J. E. Memorandum for Mr. Ridgely. 11 Oct. 1919.) Federal efforts against racial justice movements and other activist groups expanded significantly in the 1960s and 1970s with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations. Through COINTELPRO, the FBI used undercover agents to surveil and disrupt the inner circles of Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panther Party activist Stokely Carmichael, and countless other less well-known organizers.

Once the public became aware of COINTELPRO’s aggressive attempts to disrupt activist groups—most of which were filled with law-abiding citizens—under the guise of domestic counterterrorism, the Justice Department revised its guidance standards to limit the FBI’s ability to investigate and infiltrate organizations without reasonable suspicions of illegal activity. Yet evidence suggests that similar tactics have reemerged targeting 21st century racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter. According to the Brennan Center, a non-partisan policy institution, FBI agents began to track Black Lives Matter activists almost immediately after the movement gained national exposure during the Ferguson protests. (German, Michael. “The FBI Targets a New Generation of Black Activists. The Brennan Center. 26 Jun. 2020. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fbi-targets-new-generation-black-activists.)

These efforts only grew during Donald Trump’s presidency. Under his watch, the FBI created a new category of domestic terrorism known as “Black Identity Extremism” (BIE). According to the Anti-Defamation League, the FBI prioritized investigations of alleged Black extremism over the far more prevalent violent activities of right wing—and predominantly White—extremists, who were responsible for 38 of the 42 extremism-related murders in 2019. (“ADL Report: Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists.” Anti-Defamation League. 26 Feb. 2020. https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all.) Meanwhile, in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests, President Donald Trump began to label virtually all anti-racist protesters as terrorists, whether they were directly or indirectly aligned with racial justice activist groups. (Dewan, Angela. “Trump is calling protesters who disagree with him terrorists. That puts him in the company of the world’s autocrats.” CNN. 26 Jul. 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/25/politics/us-protests-trump-terrorists-intl/index.html.)

For Cullors, on the other hand, the word terrorism is best applied to the treatment of Black Americans by state actors and individuals, rather than to the people protesting this treatment like herself. In discussing police brutality, prison torture, and disenfranchisement upon reentry that disproportionately plagues Black Americans, Cullors writes, “I carry the memory of living under that terror—the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity—in my blood, my bones, in every step I take. And yet I was called a terrorist” (7).

The terror she describes in firsthand accounts from her youth—particularly the rough stop-and-frisk tactics and undeserved arrests routinely visited upon her brothers and other young Black males—is emblematic of that era of urban policing. As detailed by legal scholars like Michelle Alexander, author of 2010’s The New Jim Crow, the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s funneled billions of dollars to cities small and large to fight a literal war against a purported scourge that few Americans cared about at the onset of the era. The radically disproportionate outcomes of the War on Drugs are evident in the fact that, as Alexander points out, “African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.” (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press. 2010.)

The extent to which these disproportionate racial outcomes were intentional—a view held by Alexander and Cullors—is a matter of debate among crime experts. Needless to say, the economic conditions of urban Black communities in the 1970s and 1980s, combined with centuries of racial animus ripe for exploitation, made these neighborhoods the ideal staging ground for the War on Drugs. Cullors’s family history tracks closely with the broader trends of economic decline in Black urban neighborhoods during this era; for example, one of the biggest factors in her family’s impoverished circumstances is the closing of the Van Nuys General Motors plant where Alton works. Many scholars point to the migration of manufacturing jobs, overseas and to the suburbs, as a huge driver of poverty in disadvantaged neighborhoods during the last quarter of the 20th century. (Teitz, Michael B. and Karen Chapple. “The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality.” SSRN. 5 Apr. 1999. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=156911.) While Cullors’s childhood is one of extraordinary turmoil and suffering, it is all too representative of the experience of Black families living in large cities in the 1990s.

Finally, the quotations Cullors includes at the start of each chapter express many of her most important themes. For example, Cullors’s persistent emphasis on ancestral memory is reflected in the quote from poet Sonia Sanchez that opens the book’s Introduction: “I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people” (3). Cullors is cognizant of the activists and artists who came before and pursued racial justice, even when the pursuit felt hopeless. Beyond activists and artists, the mere fact of her Black forebears’ survival speaks to the extraordinary resilience of “ordinary” people of color. She carries this history of survival with her always, and it informs much of the book.

Elsewhere, the quotations are more direct. At the start of Chapter 1, Cullors quotes John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s National Domestic Policy Chief, who is startlingly candid about the genesis of the War on Drugs. In a 2016 interview with Harper’s Magazine, Ehrlichman said, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be […] black, but by getting the public to associate the […] blacks with heroin […] and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities” (9). This provides enormous support for the contention that the War on Drugs was an intentional assault on Black communities. Arguably the most tragic quote is the one that opens Chapter 2 from famed African-American dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey: “One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people” (18). This loss of childhood—Cullors argues that 12 is the age at which Black boys and girls are viewed as criminals or things to be discarded—is one of the most grievous consequences of American racism explored in the book.