When They Call You a Terrorist

by

Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

Gabriel Brignac Character Analysis

Gabriel was Patrisse’s father, a loving Black man who was in and out of prison for selling drugs before dying from a heart attack. Patrisse didn’t learn that Gabriel was her biological father until she was 12 years old, since Gabriel disappeared before Cherice could tell him she was pregnant, and Alton agreed to raise her as his own. When Gabriel learned about Patrisse, he showered her with affection and invited her to his graduation from a sobriety ceremony. This was where Patrisse met his extended family and was warmly welcomed as a Brignac. Gabriel was the glue that held his family together, the compassionate listener who helped them work through conflict and enjoy their weekly barbecues. He took Patrisse to 12-step meetings with him and, though she didn’t think that addicts should be solely held responsible for using drugs (she believed his addiction developed after he returned from the military with no job prospects), she appreciated the honesty she heard in the meetings and the way that Gabriel admitted his mistakes. After becoming a consistent presence in her life, Gabriel disappeared one day, and Patrisse found out that he was back in prison. Patrisse was 20 years old when Gabriel got out of prison, and they again became close, having lunch together every day when he was on break from his cement truck-driving job. When he disappeared again, Patrisse found him at a motel, drunk and high. He admitted that he had been arrested again for selling drugs, and that as a poor boy from small-town Louisiana, he just wanted a life with dignity where people respected him. Patrisse sat with him, telling him she wouldn’t leave. He went to prison again after this, but for a reduced sentence, since he agreed to serve as a first responder to the California wildfires. Gabriel returned from prison again when Patrisse was 26 and died from a heart attack a few years later. Patrisse was devastated and viewed his heart attack as an effect of existing in a racist society that didn’t support him.

Gabriel Brignac Quotes in When They Call You a Terrorist

The When They Call You a Terrorist quotes below are all either spoken by Gabriel Brignac or refer to Gabriel Brignac . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Black Lives Matter Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Monte Cullors, Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it's locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

I try continually to talk to my father about structural realities, policies and decisions as being even more decisive in the outcomes of his life than any choice he personally made. I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives.

It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:

I have never seen him high before but I refuse to turn away. If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment. He has to matter to me at this moment. Seeing him like this feels like my soul is being pulled over shards of glass but I do not turn away. His life is not expendable. Our love is not disposable. I will not be to him what the world has been to him. I will not throw him away.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Monte Cullors, Gabriel Brignac , Mark Anthony
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:
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Gabriel Brignac Quotes in When They Call You a Terrorist

The When They Call You a Terrorist quotes below are all either spoken by Gabriel Brignac or refer to Gabriel Brignac . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Black Lives Matter Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Monte Cullors, Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it's locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

I try continually to talk to my father about structural realities, policies and decisions as being even more decisive in the outcomes of his life than any choice he personally made. I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives.

It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:

I have never seen him high before but I refuse to turn away. If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment. He has to matter to me at this moment. Seeing him like this feels like my soul is being pulled over shards of glass but I do not turn away. His life is not expendable. Our love is not disposable. I will not be to him what the world has been to him. I will not throw him away.

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Monte Cullors, Gabriel Brignac , Mark Anthony
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

Related Characters: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (speaker), Gabriel Brignac
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis: