When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir: Summary & Key Insights

I grew up in Van Nuys, a part of Los Angeles where the brightness of California sunlight couldn’t hide the shadows of inequality. My neighborhood was a place of contradictions—cultural vibrancy intertwined with systemic neglect. Police helicopters hovered overhead as if to remind us of our place. Poverty wasn’t just a condition; it was a trap reinforced by policies that made surviving an act of defiance. In school, we were labeled before we were seen, and many of us carried the ache of being misunderstood.

My childhood taught me early that policing didn’t mean safety for people like us. It meant surveillance, harassment, and fear that we internalized as normal. I remember the sting of watching friends and family disappear into the system—sometimes for things that should never have been crimes. Yet amid all this, love tunneled its way through hardship. My mother worked tirelessly to keep us afloat, her strength both a shield and a reminder that endurance itself could be revolutionary. Those early experiences didn’t just define me; they awakened an understanding that survival in America, for Black people, often demanded organizing against the very systems meant to destroy us.

My family’s story is America’s story, written through the lens of incarceration and resilience. My father spent years in and out of prison—a man shaped by an unrelenting system rather than individual failings. His absence, and later his presence, revealed how incarceration fractures families yet also binds them with complicated love. My mother, Cherisse, bore the weight of raising four children alone, navigating jobs that barely sustained us. The criminal justice system was not just a political topic—it was a personal wound that bled through generations.

I saw my brother Monte struggle with mental illness, which brought him into direct contact with law enforcement. His pain was criminalized, not cared for. That experience placed me squarely against the prison-industrial complex and taught me that our fight was not just about freedom from cages, but freedom from a society that dehumanizes the most vulnerable. Family, for us, became both sanctuary and battleground—a space where love was our only weapon against the state’s relentless intrusion. Through their stories, I learned that to call for justice, you must first see the humanity in those the world calls disposable.