When They Call You a Terrorist: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Patrisse is 12 years old the first time she is arrested. It is the summer after seventh grade and, despite attending Millikan (the school for gifted children) during the year, she is back in Van Nuys for remedial math and science courses. Unlike Millikan, this school has metal detectors and police. Patrisse smokes marijuana in the bathroom during school one day to cope with the stress, something her peers at Millikan do regularly with no consequences.

Someone must have told on Patrisse, because two days later, a police officer handcuffs her in front of her class before taking her to the dean’s office and searching her bag and her clothes. Despite having no marijuana on her, she is forced to call her mother and tell her what happened. Patrisse lies, and her mother takes her side.  Later, at home, Cherice does not ask her about it, tell her she loves her, or get angry. Patrisse does not judge her for this; her kids are safe, which is enough for her.

Middle school is a culture shock because of race and class differences, but also because, before then, Patrisse had been seen as gifted. Her fourth-grade teacher gave a book about a Black girl traveling through the Jim Crow South and allowed Patrisse to teach the class about the book. Patrisse related to the terror the main character felt—police in full riot gear had recently raided her home, tearing through the house in search of her favorite uncle, who sold drugs. Unlike on television, the police were not kind to her and her young siblings, instead treating them like suspects. Patrisse presented on this book (and others) to her class, wanting her peers to see how their terror was connected to history.

Patrisse can’t take the bus to Millikan, so her mother borrows a car from Cynthia, their 19-year-old neighbor who has a child and is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in a drive-by shooting. (Cynthia has been involved with Monte and will eventually give birth to Patrisse’s nephew Chase.) Her car is a beaten-up station wagon with no back windows. Being dropped off in that car, surrounded by her peers’ fancy cars, Patrisse is ashamed of her family’s class position for the first time. She asks Cherice to drop her off before the entrance but feels conflicted about it.

Patrisse doesn’t fit in with the white kids who smoke marijuana at Millikan or the Black girls who want to be famous. People think she is weird, but she just feels like herself: a Black girl from a Mexican community who loves poetry, reading, and dancing. She befriends a white boy named Mikie and wants to show him her home. Though her mother is ashamed of their home (she grew up middle-class before being disowned by her parents), Patrisse isn’t. When not at Millikan, she feels no shame at all—she loves her community because it’s what she knows. When Mikie visits, he notices the ambulances and peeling paint and says, without malice, “I didn’t think you lived like this.” Patrisse doesn’t respond, and things are different after that.

At Millikan, Patrisse feels unsure of herself for the first time. Her grades drop, and she feels like she is on her own, like she has “become a thing to be discarded.” Her brothers learn about their own expendability while being overly policed in the streets, labeled “super-predators” based on their race. Patrisse learns this at school and will not enjoy school again until, as an adult, she pursues a degree in religion in order to become a minister.

Research has shown that 12 percent of Black girls in the U.S. receive at least one suspension during their time in school, while white girls are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. This fits with Patrisse’s experience: white people at Millikan use drugs far more than her friends at her neighborhood schools, yet those schools were full of officers in Kevlar and drug-sniffing dogs. News stories about Black girls being thrown from their seats by School Safety Officers and being threatened with expulsion for wearing their hair natural prove that they’re seen as disposable. Like some of these girls, Patrisse learns at 12 years old that “being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.” Tamir Rice was also 12 when a police officer only hesitated for two seconds before killing him.