When They Call You a Terrorist

Like many social justice scholars and critical race theorists, Cullors ascribes to the belief that the War on Drugs is, by design and in effect, a system of racial oppression. Its disproportionate effect on Black Americans—despite there being no empirical support to suggest they use or sell drugs more than White Americans—famously led legal scholar Michelle Alexander to call the War on Drugs and mass incarceration “the new Jim Crow.”

While Cullors relies on some data to make this point, her argument primarily proceeds by telling Monte’s story and reminding the reader how many other young Black men faced similar fates. From the age of 11, Monte is targeted by police officers who are newly empowered and incentivized to make small-time drug arrests. To Cullors, the fact that the police target her neighborhood, as opposed to the wealthier and Whiter neighborhood of nearby Sherman Oaks, is evidence that the War on Drugs is a system of racial oppression. When describing the preponderance of drugs in Sherman Oaks, where she attends school, Cullors describes a White friend whose brother sells so much weed that he keeps it in garbage bags: “But,” she writes, “that surprises me less than the fact that not only has he never been arrested, he’s never even feared arrest” (16). Meanwhile, Monte and his friends are arrested dozens of times with far smaller quantities of illegal drugs on their person. Often, they have no drugs but are arrested anyway for “talking back.”

This criminalization of Black youths—which Cullors says generally begins around age 12—happens at school, too. Truancy, cutting class, and other offenses that would land students in predominantly White schools a reprimand or, at worst, detention, often come with criminal charges in Black schools, Cullors writes. The transformation of Black schools into prison-like institutions grows even worse after the 1999 Columbine shooting, despite that tragedy taking place in a majority-White community. Quoting a report from the organization States of Incarceration, Cullors writes:

The presence of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, harsh ticketing policies, and prison-inspired architecture has created a generation of students, usually poor and of color, who are always under surveillance and always under suspicion. These modes of controlling spaces and the youth within them normalize expectations of criminality (78).

Having received a torrent of messages—from the police, from teachers, from the media—that they are criminals, it is little wonder that young Black men like Monte engage in illegal behavior.

Finally, the criminal label doesn’t end after a person serves his or her sentence. Upon reentry, Monte’s felony record curtails his ability to obtain gainful employment and secure housing. These realities play a direct role in Monte’s second arrest, exposing the unending cycle of criminalization that begins in childhood but can last a lifetime.

At one point or another, Cullors and the rest of the key figures in her life all share a common emotional response to systemic injustice: guilt. Cullors feels it as a child when Alvin, forced out of work by the closure of the Van Nuys General Motors plant, leaves his family. Unaware of the global economic dynamics that sent manufacturing jobs overseas and to the suburbs, and unaware that these labor and technological shifts hit the Black working class the hardest, Cullors comes to the only conclusion that makes sense to her: She did something wrong to send Alvin away. This is one of the more tragic examples of how racial injustice hurts young people the most.

Yet while Cullors quickly comes to acknowledge the structural and systemic reasons for her family’s suffering, other characters carry this guilt well into adulthood. Gabriel, for instance, is unwilling to acknowledge the role racism and inequality play in his economic hardship and, by extension, his drug addiction. Instead, he embraces the language of 12-step programs that attribute drug addiction and alcoholism almost exclusively to an individual’s own personality defects. Although these programs actively discourage guilt, it is easy to see why men like Gabriel experience guilt anyway when subjected to this moral framework.

However, it is Cherice who feels this guilt most acutely. In the courthouse, as Monte faces life in prison for a nonviolent offense, Cullors writes, “[M]y mother accesses the only feeling she’d ever been allowed to access freely. Guilt. […] Guilt that she could not keep these moral monsters from harming her body” (125). Like Gabriel, Cherice is “the collateral damage in the battle to elevate personal responsibility over everything, over all those decisions that were made about state budget priorities, about wages, about the presence of police” (124). This isn’t to say that Cullors denies her family members autonomy in her depictions of them. She means only that the social and cultural forces they are up against are so formidable that they should not feel guilt. Even more insidious is that personal guilt is a feature of oppression, in that it causes the oppressed to blame themselves rather than the system.