When They Call You a Terrorist: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

With Gabriel in prison, Patrisse loses touch with his extended family. They only knew each other for four years, after all, and Gabriel was the glue holding the family together. Patrisse’s cousin Naomi tells her that the family no longer spends time together without Gabriel. Still, Patrisse stays in touch with him through letters. In Gabriel’s letters, he apologizes and promises better times in the future. Patrisse tells him she misses him. Neither shares intimate details about their lives, including why he was sent to prison.

Monte goes to prison soon after Gabriel. He doesn’t pick Patrisse up from dance class from one day, which doesn’t worry her because he’s generally been acting strangely—some days he’s full of love and energy and giving her money, other days he’s crying in the bathroom for hours and she can’t get him to come out. He also sometimes doesn’t sleep for days, talking non-stop. Patrisse assumes that his drug use causes the mood swings, and she also feels he has a right to inconsistency because “He never knows how the world will greet him, after all.” Monte had been arrested throughout her childhood, including a few years before when a cop came up to him while they were walking down the street, handcuffed him, and took him away. She doesn’t know a single boy in her community who hasn’t been arrested at least once.

All of this is happening while Americans of all races are part of the fight to end apartheid in South Africa. In his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech, Nelson Mandela   describes the effects of white supremacy on South Africa: Black people are seen as less than human and do not have access to schools, well-paying jobs, or the ability to own their own homes. Patrisse sees the struggles in South Africa in 1964 as similar to Los Angeles in 1992—unequal spending on schools, no social services or programs, meager job opportunities, families being torn apart as parents are thrown in jail.

Patrisse realizes these similarities between South Africa and LA only after she attends Millikan and sees how white people live. One day, she goes over to her white friend Tiffany’s house in Sherman Oaks and has dinner, marveling at how their house has a separate dining room and that Tiffany’s parents are home to join them (whereas her mother works from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day). Tiffany’s father asks her about her day and what she wants to be when she grows up, and Patrisse feels she is in a TV show like 90210. With her own family, she talks and laughs, but not like this—pain is always there just below the surface.

Patrisse and Tiffany’s father will both realize over the course of her visits there that he is her family’s landlord—a “slum lord” who owns many buildings in Van Nuys and allowed Patrisse’s family to go a year without a working fridge. Unsure what to do with this shocking information, Patrisse says nothing, thinking people will assume she made it up. But it’s true—he is part of the white wealthy community that wants to keep Black people like her family separate.

This is the 1990s, the middle of the war on drugs and the war on gangs. Being Black or Mexican makes you a drug dealer or dangerous criminal, and a group of boys becomes a gang. There is also no money going into schools (or school lunches). If young people of color don’t die, they—like Monte—cycle in and out of juvenile detention centers, being trained for prison as adults. They are beaten and abused, forced to use the bathroom in public, then sent back into the world hardened, teaching other boys that they need to man up.

Though it’s possible that removing one thief or bully might make a community safer, removing parents from Black children’s lives makes them much less safe. With no adults around, there is no one to love or protect them, no one to tell them that they matter, so they have to raise themselves. “Gangs” are really just groups of young people taking care of one another against the army of police officers on foot, in cars, and in helicopters that surveil them all day and night. 

Monte and his friends try to stay safe from these police officers who “s[ee] the enemy as anyone Black or Brown who move[s].” They are imprisoned for minor crimes like tagging and cutting class, and also just for being kids or talking back. As the ACLU later describes, “Gang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities […] illegal for people they target.” They note that racial profiling is inevitable with these overly broad laws, and that no white gang in California has ever been targeted (despite evidence that they exist). Republicans and Democrats, both Black and white, supported these “super-predator” laws.

Young people are easy targets because they do not have the right to vote. By labeling them criminals, adults can absolve themselves of any responsibility for the youth not having access to resources. And moving money from youth services (schools, arts, sports, etc.) doesn’t work—between 1990 and 2010, 10,000 young people will have died in Los Angeles.  This is why young people of color looked out for one another. Patrisse’s brother Paul didn’t get caught in the criminal justice system only because he wasn’t allowed to be a kid; after Alton left, he took over all of the house responsibilities and couldn’t participate in normal teenage behavior.

This time, when Monte is arrested, he is 19 and accused of robbery and goes to prison (rather than juvie) for the first time. It takes two months to even locate where he has been imprisoned and, when Cherice is finally allowed to visit him at Twin Towers Detention Center, she finds him emaciated, bruised, and drugged. Patrisse only learns years later, after he is in prison, that Monte was having a schizoaffective episode and hearing voices when he was arrested. No one explains this to his family or tells them that the sheriffs at the jail were the ones who beat him, tied him down, and gave him the wrong drugs for his condition. When Cherice sees him, he can’t speak but touches the glass to meet her hand. She tells him she loves him.

Monte is facing six years in prison for attempted burglary, a crime he committed because the voices in his head told him to. In prison, he doesn’t understand the prisoner-enforced racial segregation, and a Mexican gang member stabs him. After moving to a mental health unit, he isn’t stabbed again. (By 2015, there will be 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in prison than there are in psychiatric hospitals.) Monte writes Patrisse incoherent letters every week about crying, Jehovah, and more.

There are no counselors for Patrisse to talk to, but she has friends. Rosa, a dark-skinned Mexican girl, is her first friend when she starts attending a magnet program centered on social justice and the arts at Cleveland High School. In 10th grade, they befriend Cheyenne—whom Patrisse will become very close to—and Carla, who is bold, loud, and queer. Patrisse tells them about Monte and they start writing to him in prison, too, such that he comes to feel like their brother. In his responses to them, Monte is more coherent, indicating that he’s been properly medicated. Patrisse is grateful for the family she’s creating with her friends.

Monte is released from prison in 2003, two years after Patrisse graduates from high school. Carla drives Patrisse to pick him up from the bus station. Monte is unwell—swollen from all the medication he’s on and having a full-blown episode. The prison failed to stabilize him before he left and also failed to give him pants, so he is wearing boxers, a muscle shirt, and shower slippers. Patrisse goes to hug him but he rejects her by simply getting into the car and saying “okay” when she tells him she loves him. The family has planned a Welcome Home Monte party with Monte’s siblings and son, but Monte sits in the corner like a zombie while Cherice watches him with pain on her face.

For the next few days, Monte doesn’t sleep or eat and acts erratically, rubbing toothpaste on the walls and shouting nonsense. Cherice eventually breaks down crying one day, which is not like her. Monte’s episode worsens to the point that nothing he says is coherent. He won’t talk to Patrisse but will talk to Bernard, Cherice’s new partner (whom she will later marry). Together, they try to convince him to go to the hospital. Patrisse calls for an ambulance but, upon learning he is a felon, the dispatcher tells her she has to call the police.  

Patrisse and Cherice decide there is no other choice and call the police, explaining Monte’s history to law enforcement. When two rookie officers arrive, Patrisse makes them agree not to be violent (after they casually say they will tase him if needed). When Monte sees the officers, he drops to his knees and cries, “Please don’t take me back.” Patrisse tells the police to leave and holds Monte on the floor as he cries, telling him she’s sorry. Bernard then takes Monte for a walk, but he destroys items in the supermarket and movie theater, finally agreeing to go to the hospital, where he stabilizes over the course of three weeks. Patrisse now sees Cherice as the reason they got through that time—her family disavowed her, but Cherice refused to disavow anyone in hers. She held the family together.