#(spoiler alert: it's still very racist/colonialist)

[medusinestories]

Read Tintin, they said. It's for kids, they said.

Every night for the next 4-5 years I lay petrified in my bed unable to get to sleep because there were mummies crawling about in my room ready to grab me if I moved. Thanks, Hergé.

[insideanairport]

Patrisse Cullors' “When They Call You a Terrorist”

❍❍❍

A Black Lives Matter Memoir

After reading this book, you might find yourself so excited that you want to only read books by black women writers. The book is as exciting and informing as autobiographies of black radical activists such as Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. It reminds us of other works such as: Push Out, We Were Eight Years in Power, Long Walk to Freedom, White Fragility, Golden Gulag, and Revolutionary Suicide. It is written smoothly with a down-to-earth style of writing. She has a non-academic working-class tone that connects with everyone.

POPO

The ending of the book [Spoiler Alert] is very powerful with the birth of Patrisee’s child, the presidency of Trump, the rise of hate crimes, mentioning the names of victims of police brutality and the future of the Black struggle. On a #SayHerName-style, she brings to light the names of victims of police violence and white supremacy. She reminds us of the ordinary Americans who lost their lives due to police racism. People such as Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Shelly Hilliard, Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Kathryn Johnston. The reason for this imperative is that women are often left out when the histories of white supremacy, slavery, and genocide are told.

”These few names are only part of a long, terrible list, but, like the horrific history of lynching in this country, when the story is told, women are often left out of it even as we are lynched, too. And some of the women are pregnant at the time of the lynching. And maybe because our movement is being led by women, Queer and straight, cisgender and Trans. And maybe because so many of us have family who have been harmed in jails and prisons but that harm has not become part of the broader public discussion about the bind, torture, kill that is part and parcel of the American system of incarceration.”

Colonial Structures

In chapter 15, Patrisse identifies the United States as the country of borders and walls. As a first-generation immigrant, I completely agree with this description. I don’t take this description only literally. This definition of the United States as the country of borders and walls does not only apply to the brutal border regime with concentration camps for children, deportations, and criminalization of asylum seekers. It also applies to the European mindset which is always preoccupied with congealing definitions and categories. It prevents people to accept each other for who they are and making an effort to understand cultural differences and historical trauma in order to heal the previous wounds inflicted. 

Historically speaking, white supremacy has a tendency to define and categorize everything outside of itself as the “other” or “minority” or “abnormal”. When I was living in the United States, I thought this solely applies to the North American mindset. However, If we look into European societies as well as European settler-colonial states around the world, we see the same type of mentality reminiscent of colonial enlightenment which still hasn’t been flushed out of the systems.

Patrisse has lost close friends and family to police brutality and white supremacy. She is telling the reader, if her dead body was found in police custody, we should know that the police have killed her. Her position is not only from a radical black perspective, but it is also within the black queer tradition.

We know historically that women often do the work and men get the credit for it. And living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to centre men and their voices rather than women and their work.

She skillfully takes the reader into the “world" of the working-class black community in America. In some instances, she takes us even deeper into the community of queer activists of color. The non-black reader should naturally understand the reality of ethnic profiling targeted towards the black and Latinx communities. The history of police in the United States is founded upon white supremacy, slavery and defense of public property. 

Today, if we step out of North America, we see similar patterns of police brutality emerging increasingly in Western and Eastern Europe. European societies as the so-called defenders of Western democracy and civility are turning into deportation regimes and in some cases semi-apartheid Islamophobic regimes. Although they are spending tremendous energy in hiding the data from the international community and presenting themselves as civil and superior to North America, they increasingly see themselves vulnerable to the new generation of BIPoC activists and organizers. 

The European Network Against Racism (ENAR) after releasing its 4-year report in 2018, noted that hate crimes that target racial and ethnic minorities are on the rise and need immediate actions to be prevented. Yet, only one-third of the 24 member states have guidelines, policies, and instructions for the police in documenting the hate crimes. If that doesn’t sound right to you, you are not the only one. First of all, the question comes to mind what does the other two-third think about hate crimes? and the second question is that “Are you designating the police in charge of documenting the hate crimes, even though a good portion of hate crimes might actually come from police themselves? The report also shows that the police do not take reports of racist crimes seriously or they do not believe the victims of racially motivated crimes. (1) 

Turns out that Stephen Lawrence and Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi are not the only people in Europe to be the victim of hate crime. (2) Recent reporting shows that London recorded 1,652 antisemitic incidents in 2018, an increase of 16% in one year. (3) Meanwhile, in the United States, the FBI reported that in 2018 alone, 8,646 people were victims of hate crime in 7,036 single-bias incidents. Almost 60% of these incidents were motivated by race, ethnicity, and ancestry. (4)

Another EU survey in 2015-2016 showed that 14% of respondents with different ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds have been stopped by police in the 12 months preceding the survey. (5) In France, according to the results of a national survey of more than 5,000 respondents, Arab and African men are twenty times more likely to be stopped and searched than other males groups. (6) In England and Wales, black people were nine and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. (7) All these are excluding the Algorithmic profiling that has been vastly problematic across Europe due to its preexisting structural racism. 

When Silicon Valley first emerges, it might as well be a Nordic country for all its homogeneity. Even today, its diversity has not yet found a way to reach into the communities of those who were legally and willfully excluded.

ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018 (1)

In occupied Palestine, we see the same techniques of systemic killings being exercised towards Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, police, and settler-colonialists. That might be one of the reasons for the huge solidarity between Palestinians and Black activists in Ferguson when military tanks started to appear on American streets. (8) Today, beyond Angela Davis’s pro-Palestinian activism and support for the BDS movement, we see a broader unification of forces between black & brown activism with Palestinian liberation.  

Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase “collateral damage,” the use of which was ratcheted up in the 90s so they didn’t have to say dead Iraqi children.

Formerly incarcerated mothers, organizers and activists at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., after performing a play highlighting Black-Palestinian solidarity on September 3, 2018. (Will Johnson) -972mag (11)

Governmental Terrorism

“There’s a difference between abuse and torture. Both are horrible, often unbearable, and both leave scars. Neither can be minimized. But I make the distinction here in order to explain that while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity.”

Patrisse recalls a day when his brother Monte gets into a car accident with a white woman, and she calls the cops on him. LAPD arrives and arrests Monte after tasing him brutally. Patrisse's brother gets into trouble simply because he has a mental problem and he is black. Later in the book, she asks herself: why cops never seem to understand that black people can also have mental illness?

She criticizes the classical racist “War on Drugs“ policies that were basically “War on Black and Latinxs peoples”. Even Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted that the purpose of these laws was to target black peoples and anti-war students. (9) The laws were written so broadly that it made otherwise normal daily activities illegal. It gave police a nice opportunity to arrest those who targeted. These policies are similar to the strategies used on indigenous peoples which have resulted in spending more money on erasing their language rather than saving them. (10) The War on Drugs was the campaign to start the prison industrial complex targeting Black and Latinx peoples. And these laws were so ineffective, that for example in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2010, about 10,000 people died.

As of this writing, three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.

BLM

After reading this book, if a non-black person [anywhere] doesn’t see the police brutality as something real toward black and brown communities in the United States, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. If after reading this book, someone doesn’t comprehend the urgency and magnitude of the Black Lives Matter movement, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. 

There are many white folks who decide to stay neutral amidst the rise of far-right racism and xenophobia. “White Silence is consent” was a slogan introduced by the Civil Rights activists in the ’50s and ’60s. Today, after Trump’s presidency and impeachment, amidst all the human rights violations that the United States government is inflicting upon humanity, remaining silent is taking the side of white supremacy.  

“…while I know the basics of what he experienced the first time he was sent to LA County Jail in 1999, a jail run by the sheriff’s department, it will not be until 2011 when I read a report issued by the ACLU of Southern California that I fully understand what was done to my brother there. This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.”

Culture Issues

Patrisse Cullors talk about her memory when her white classmate invited her for dinner. She accepts the invitation. When they are eating at the dinner table with the family, the father is asking Patrisse questions such as "have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up?". She tells herself: “It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.” And then she asks herself: "Have I ever known such a moment in my own home?"

White people’s economic and money-oriented mindset is well known around the world. White parents like to talk about money during mealtime, even when kids are around. In contrast to this first-world behavior of homo economicus, the majority of non-Western cultures highly value the eating time as something important if not sacred. It is the designated time for the family and loved ones.

Bib.

1. racism, european network against. ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018. s.l. : ENAR - European Network Against Racism aisbl, 2018.

2. Pianigiani, Gaia. ‘Racist’ Killing of Nigerian Asylum Seeker Stuns and Saddens Italy. nytimes. [Online] July 7, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/world/europe/racist-killing-of-nigerian-asylum-seeker-stuns-and-saddens-italy.html.

3. Staff, Algemeiner. UK Jewish Communal Body Reports Record Number of Antisemitic Outrages During 2018. algemeiner. [Online] 2 7, 2019. https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/02/07/uk-jewish-communal-body-reports-record-number-of-antisemitic-outrages-during-2018/.

4. (UCR), The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting. 2018 Hate Crime Statistics. United States Department of Justice. [Online] 2018. https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics.

5. Rights, European Union Agency for Fundamental. Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II) . Luxembourg: Publications Of ce of the European Union : European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2017, 2017.

6. defenseurdesdroits. Enquête sur l’accès aux droits Volume 1 - Relations police / population : le cas des contrôles d'identité. s.l. : defenseurdesdroits, 2017.

7. Mijatović, Dunja. Ethnic profiling: a persisting practice in Europe . Commissioner for Human Rights. [Online] 2019. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/ethnic-profiling-a-persisting-practice-in-europe#_ftnref5.

8. Ahmed, Nasim. A new civil rights movement unites Palestinians and Black Americans. middleeastmonitor. [Online] April 5, 2019. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190405-a-new-civil-rights-movement-unites-palestinians-and-black-americans/.

9. LoBianco, Tom. Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies. CNN. [Online] March 24, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.

10. Nagle, Rebecca. The U.S. has spent more money erasing Native languages than saving them. newsmaven. [Online] Dec 6, 2019. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them-qh2w3-wqPUCNqrGcblbHQg.

11. Taylor, Jen Marlowe and Je Naé. From Palestine to Ferguson: Reflections on shared grief and liberation. 972mag. [Online] Oct 1, 2018. https://www.972mag.com/october-2000-killings-black-palestine-solidarity-play/.