Welcome to the Book Club Corner! This series is intended to share fiction and non-fiction book recommendations that have a diversity, equity, and inclusion focus. These books have been read by United Way of Clallam County staff and we believe they are informative, inspiring, and useful. Each month, we'll share a book intended to support your diversity, equity, and inclusion journey. Happy reading!
When They Call You a Terrorist
This month's book is When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. This book is available as an audiobook and e-book through the North Olympic Library System and on the shelves at the Port Angeles branch. You can also find it at local bookstores or your preferred online bookseller.
When They Call You a Terrorist is a poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America - and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free. Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse's outrage let her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Black Lives Matter has since grown to an international organization with dozens of chapters and thousands of determined activists fighting anti-Black racism world-wide.
Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustrices inflicted upon people with Black and Brown skin. It is a reflection on humanity and an empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience. It is a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.
About the Authors
Patrisse Khan-Cullors
Patrisse Khan-Cullors is an artist, organizer, and freedom fighter from Los Angeles, California. Cofounder of Black Lives Matter, she is also a performance artist, Fulbright scholar, popular public speaker, and an NAACP History Maker. She's received many awards for activism and movement building, including being named by the Los Angeles Times as a Civil Rights Leader for the 21st Century and a Glamour 2016 Woman of the Year.
In the summer of 2013, fueled by the acquittal granted to George Zimmerman after his murder of Trayvon Martin, Patrisse co-founded a global movement with a hashtag.
asha bandele
An award-winning author and journalist, asha bandele first attained recognition when she penned her 1999 debut book, The Prisoner's Wife, a powerful, lyrical memoir about a young Black woman's romance and marriage with a man who was serving a twenty-to-life sentence in prison. With the hope that they would live as a couple in the outside world, she became pregnant with a daughter. A former features editor for Essence Magazine, she returns with her latest memoir, Something Like Beautiful, the continuation of her love with Rashid and its ultimate loss, when another emotional disappointment and a serious bout of depression. She is also the author of two collections of poems and the novel, Daughter.
Suggestion for an upcoming book?
If you would like to see a book highlighted in a future newsletter, please reach out to Community Impact Director Mary Beth Gregory at mary.beth@unitedwayclallam.org