Her mother is a survivor focused on the well-being of her children her birth father, Gabriel, whose stints in prison leave him often unable to participate in her life, encourages everyone to “choose love” and her older brother Monte, who will later be imprisoned and told he has schizoaffective disorder, has a “ginormous heart.” But love cannot save her family from external forces, and Khan-Cullors does her best to contextualize their circumstances. Khan-Cullors’s memoir begins in Van Nuys, Calif., in “a two-story, tan-colored building where the paint is peeling and where there is a gate that does not close properly and an intercom system that never works.” Her language is poetic even if her childhood wasn’t. “When They Call You a Terrorist,” by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, written with asha bandele, a former features editor at Essence, abandons such abstractions for details - at times one wishes there were even more - to help readers understand what it means to be a black woman in the United States today.
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