Yet another reminder of James Baldwin’s words*
“If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, is a deep book, y’all, and it is not a philosophical treatise of the meaning and purpose of “Black Lives Matter” as something that is plopped down into life, shoving aside other things, just one of many interests in the black community.
This is the story of one person growing up–and growing up–to see the world around her with an acute eye as to its hostility to her and her community. Her community is not so much defined by appearance or even origin, but by the demand of the majority community for there to be scapegoats for their fears and laborers for their industrial complexes. “Forever you will excluded and feared, hated and needed, imprisoned and prosecuted. And forever you will be denied your voice and your agency.”
The unfortunate thing for such autocratic societies is that somehow we still see a sport arising from unexpected ground, the development of a threat to such a society. Ms Khan-Cullors, the child of a single mom working two or three jobs in a working-poor neighborhood, awakens to beauty and to knowledge, and with the great gifts within her, becomes herself. Her voice is heard, her thoughts are considered, her efforts bring results, her passions are honored.
But not without great pain, great failures, great disappointments, great losses. Life is not fair in general, but there is something deliberate about the cruelty to which our black brothers and sisters* are subjected to, targets of hate and fear and rage by the white majority for reasons that reason cannot explain.
Ms Khan-Cullors is perhaps extraordinary in all this, in that she is hard and confident and energized–but she is also a child who wants her father, who’s taken away and jailed many times; wants her brother, who is taken away, jailed, and tortured, many times; wants family and love and safety but is guaranteed none of these things–indeed, they are taken away or wrecked by the casual disinterest of a majority society that cannot, will not, see her.
One key element of Black Lives Matter is the centrality of women, and of gender-queer, trans, and gender non-conforming. This is something that most media accounts leave out, preferring to find people who can represent the idea of what a movement leader should look like. Thankfully, many of those media-elevated leaders acknowledge that the real leaders are those who suffered so much, organized so much, and accomplished so much. I am thankful, for example, to read of men who were tasked as the voices of BLM but who said “this is not something I started. This is something that three queer women started.”
This is a very human-centered book. People exist here, people wanting to live and be free, unmolested by their majority culture that demands their obeisance and compliance. In the hard spaces and the thin spaces they find the room to love and mourn and celebrate and depart. And they find that “at the end of the day, from love we come. To love we must return.”
* I am unable to find the work in which Baldwin wrote this, but I see this quoted by others.