When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rage Against Poverty and Police

Racial hatred is the root evil of society. It is the emblem and model for all other kinds of prejudice and exclusion. Its core is in language which is used to degrade and ostracise. Where it exists it poisons society against itself. When it is tolerated, it dominates the life of society. When such tolerance is rationalised as a matter of personal right or necessary for social stability, any attempt to eliminate it is perceived as an act of terrorism. This is the capstone, the Trump card, one might say, of the inherently racial society. And it deserves to be raged at.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors started Black Lives Matter. The poetic force of rage in the phrase alone is enough to get her designated a terrorist in American society. It points directly to how language is used as the primary means of oppression. Angela Davis’s introduction makes the essential point: “No white supremacist purveyor of violence has ever, to my knowledge, been labeled a terrorist by the state.” But three poor non-white women who refuse to be crushed by that society are, just for the phrase alone.

There is no question but that the law enforcement in the United States has been explicitly designed to subjugate black people. Khan-Cullors quotes John Ehrlichmann, Nixon’s Head of Domestic policy: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … black, but by getting the public to associate the … blacks with heroin … and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities … Did we know we were lying? Of course we did.” This linguistic strategy has become an integral part of American culture, virtually a theological principle, “a God gone astray in the flesh” as Paul Valery called this sort of linguistic abuse.

Nixon turned regional racial prejudice into a national political force. He injected the virus of racial hatred that had thrived in the former slaves states into the body of the entire country. He did it more or less openly - not through the courts, which had been constrained by legislation, but through the police, which became the tools of what other writers have called the New Jim Crow, a regime of barely legalised persecution, including unwarranted and unjustifiable death. Crucially, he defused the rage, he made it suspect.

Nixon’s political genius has stood the test of time. He knew his audience. He successfully alienated black America from the rest of society and neutralised its political power. The fabric of communities was systematically destroyed, and with that their threatened electoral importance. The system of marginalisation worked even better than it had during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War because it could be carried out under the headline of Crime Reduction - the ideal rationalisation for a racism that no longer needed to justify itself. Justice had become the dialectical opposite of Law & Order.

Racial hatred is the central political and sociological fact in America. Race is not a sideshow; it is, and always has been, the main event. Nixon and his successors have provided political excuses and distractions in order to ignore race. Black Lives Matter makes that less possible by bringing back the rage which is the only ethical response appropriate to the situation.

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