For nearly 100 days, Patrisse Khan-Cullors could not find her older brother. She and her family called the sheriff’s department every day, and were told he had been arrested, but no one could locate him.

Khan-Cullors explained that her brother had been “disappeared”: a practice in law enforcement, some allege, of taking someone into custody and having them vanish within the system.

When her brother, 20, finally emerged, the family learned that during his time in custody he had been diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder by the Los Angeles Police Department. He told the family a story of having been beaten and tortured.

Shortly thereafter, Khan-Cullors' brother was sentenced to 40 months in prison. When she saw the state her brother was in once he was finally released back home—overmedicated, emaciated and in the middle of a manic episode—she committed herself to looking after him.

“Not just for him but for me,” said the artist, organizer and co-founder of Black Lives Matter in a discussion with Dean’s Leadership Scholar Richard Aviles, a dual degree MSW/MPL student, from the stage of Bovard Auditorium at the University of Southern California on April 24. “It was deeply traumatic to see what they did to him. So, I built a community that could take care of him, but also take care of me and my mother.”

She described friends and family coming together to make her brother feel safe and get him the care he needed. When they realized that they could no longer help him at home, they worked to get him into a hospital. “I was really proud of us,” she said. “We didn't call the police, and we got him to the hospital safe. He was safe, and we were safe. And we brought an entire team to support him. One of the biggest successes of my own life.”

This took place nearly two decades ago, and it was one of the formative times in Khan-Cullors’ life that she spoke with Aviles about on the Bovard stage. Aviles, one of the event organizers, sat with his marked-up and well-worn copy of Khan-Cullors’ New York Times Bestseller, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, which she wrote with co-author Asha Bandele. It served as a roadmap for his discussion with Khan-Cullors on family, community, queerness and the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the Forefront of Activism

Aviles and Khan-Cullors met a decade ago as members of the Bus Riders Union, a civil rights organization, where she became Aviles’ mentor. Aviles, as a gay Latino teenager living in south central Los Angeles, found community and a home in the union, where he thrived on the chants—occasionally belting them out during the evening’s discussion—demanding public transportation as a human right, and more buses, not more police, on the streets.

That made perfect sense to Khan-Cullors, for whom building a sense of home, community and chosen family is a priority. “For those of us who end up at the margins,” she said, “who are pushed away, cast aside, who are seen as ‘other’ very early on, home and family become incredibly important.”

Khan-Cullors, now 34, grew up in “the valley” of northern Los Angeles. But, as she puts it, not that valley. “My valley was a working-class suburb, super multi-racial and over-policed. I came to realize the impact of living in a neighborhood mostly black and brown and mostly poor, surrounded by white wealth and the fear of black people.” She viewed her neighborhood as ground zero for the wars on crime and drugs, wars based on a fear of young people of color, in which she and her siblings were targets.

However, Khan-Cullors felt very lucky to have attended a high school with a focus on social justice. There she started to acquire the language for all the things she had experienced in everyday life: racism, classism, sexism and homophobia. “Once I had a language for it,” she said, “and knowing that I had built relationships with people who were trying to fight back against oppressive systems, oppressive dynamics, this became the center for how I would build. I never saw that separate from my personal work—the personal was always political.”

In social work, there is a lot of talk about complex trauma, Aviles noted, but not a lot about complex treatment. For Khan-Cullors, knowledge imbues treatment. “I knew it wasn’t right what I experienced,” she said, “what I’d seen and what my family had experienced and seen. I knew it wasn’t right, the generation of trauma that black people have gone through in this country and throughout the world. So, I asked, ‘What’s my own journey in all of this?’ And when I started to get more clarity and understanding, I felt this shouldn't just be for me, personally.”

She joked that the father who raised her always said she was born a few decades too late for the black power movement. But in her bones, she felt the need to organize. When Aviles pointed out that queer people of color have historically been at the forefront of activism, it was met with voracious applause from the audience.

“I think it’s important to understand that queerness is a politic, not just an identity,” agreed Khan-Cullors, who came out as queer at 15. “When we’re talking about queerness, we’re talking about challenging norms and we’re talking about being able to see things differently. Being able to imagine a world differently. Because we are literally different.”

The Real Meaning of Black Lives Matter

What excites her now is people getting to be their full selves. “We get to show up, unapologetically. And the big part of starting Black Lives Matter, for Alicia [Garza], Opal [Tometi] and me, was to challenge the norm of the black power movement. To challenge the patriarchy. So, what does it mean to not just challenge that, but to forge a new path for us? For queer folks, for queer black and brown folks? It’s such a powerful opportunity that we’re in right now.”

For Khan-Cullors, this is an important time for white people to re-claim “whiteness as anti-racist whiteness” and to become “co-conspirators” in Black Lives Matter. “For white folks, accountability is not just I’m sorry that I have white privilege, it is I’m sorry that I have white privilege, and this is what I’m committing to doing for the rest of my entire life because I know you—brown person, woman—don’t have a choice.”

During the question-and-answer segment of the evening, an emotional USC student asked Khan-Cullors how to get white people to understand what it feels like to walk in the shoes of different types of people. Khan-Cullors responded by mapping out the universality of the movement.

“I think white folks will never be able to walk in our shoes,” Khan-Cullors said. “So, I think we need to stop expecting that. But I do think that we can call on white folks to do the work. I think there’s this myth that when we say black lives matter that we’re literally just talking about black people. We’re actually, literally, saying that everybody should be standing up for black lives. This is an opportunity for everybody to show up for humanity.”

Khan-Cullors, who is currently a student at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, believes there is a lot the USC community can do to influence what happens in Los Angeles. “I think we’re in an evolutionary moment and so if we’re striving to evolve out of the behaviors of the past, I think that’s where we should aim.”

She urges a deeper commitment to ending mass incarceration in our cities, ending state violence and fighting Los Angeles County’s $3.5 billion jail plan.

Khan-Cullors is focused on saving humanity, which she believes is ultimately what will save the planet. “Los Angeles becomes the center of a planetary fight,” she said. “That’s what we’re up against right now. Our fight is to save the planet. And so, if we can save Los Angeles, I bet you we can save the world.”

This event was presented by the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work Department of Social Change and Innovation, NASW-USC Unit, the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the USC School of Architecture, and organized by Dean’s Leadership Scholar Richard Aviles, MSW/MPL ’19, and student supporters Kelsie Bonaparte, MSW ’18, and Alix Schwartz, MSW ’18.