External Forces vs. Personal Responsibility Theme Analysis

Throughout When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse notices that many Black people in her life have gotten blamed for the hard choices they’ve made—the external factors that led them to that choice are rarely taken into account. For example, her stepfather, Alton, was an inconsistent presence in her life, but only after he was laid off from the stable job he had for 20 years and was unable to find another one. And her father, Gabriel, struggled with drug addiction, but only after coming home traumatized from war and having no social services available to him. By illuminating the external forces—such as racism and lack of access to resources—that lead people to certain choices in life, Patrisse challenges the “politics of personal responsibility” that suggest individuals are solely responsible for the decisions they make.

When examining her mother and stepfather’s choices, Patrisse sees how, given the external forces at play, they could not have acted any other way. When Patrisse’s brother Monte was in the throes of a manic episode after being arrested, their mother, Cherice, broke down. She told Patrisse that she felt guilty, as if Monte becoming mentally ill and going to prison were results of her poor parenting choices. Patrisse tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault, that she was “collateral damage in the battle to elevate personal responsibility over everything,” and that the real culprits were the people in power who made the decisions “about state budget priorities, about wages, about the presence of police, and even about damn grocery stores and access to quality food.” The implication here is that if Cherice had been paid more or been able to work fewer hours (and thereby been able to be more present in Monte’s life), or if Monte had not suffered abuse at the hands of police for being Black, he could have had a different fate. It was not Cherice’s choices that led to his suffering, but external factors like racism, the war on drugs, and the war on gangs.

Moreover, Patrisse’s stepfather, Alton, didn’t openly express regret or guilt about his decision to leave their family when Patrisse was six, but she nonetheless views his decision as similarly bound by oppressive social forces. Alton only left the family after losing a well-paying job he held for 20 years at a nearby GM auto plant; the plant closed, and Alton was unable to find a job that would allow him to provide for his family. Noting that Black unemployment in LA at the time was worse than it was during the 2008 Great Recession, Patrisse implies that it wasn’t Alton’s fault that he couldn’t find employment, but the fault of economic downturn and discriminatory employers. Between GM choosing to close the plant and employers choosing not to hire Alton (or to pay him a living wage), Alton’s choices were bound by external forces outside of his control.

Patrisse is also critical of her biological father, Gabriel, blaming himself for life choices that were outside of his control. Gabriel started selling drugs after a couple of tours in the military—a choice he felt forced to make in order to supplement his mother’s income—and found himself unable to access the benefits of the G.I. Bill (such as low-cost education and housing) because he was Black. Though he blamed himself for this choice, Patrisse tried to explain to him that personal responsibility is “mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives.” Gabriel also blamed himself for becoming addicted to drugs in the process of selling them, a point of view that was encouraged at his 12-step program meetings. Patrisse went to the meetings with him and couldn’t help but feel that “they d[id] not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use” such as lack of access to good jobs, affordable housing, or treatment centers. In other words, she saw forces like racial and economic oppression as the root cause of Gabriel’s addiction and didn’t begrudge him for turning to drugs in the face of his suffering.

There are several other moments in her memoir where Patrisse notes that the choices people in her community made were wrongly attributed to personal responsibility. Richie—one of Patrisse’s students when she ran a restorative mediation program at her former high school—ended up going to prison at the age of 18, after his hours working for the school system suddenly got cut and he resorted to robbery in order to pay rent. While many labeled Richie a “criminal” for his actions, Patrisse saw that he was only trying to survive in the face of external forces. Had lawmakers granted the public school system a larger budget (showing that they were invested in providing quality education and good jobs in low-income communities), Richie’s hours likely wouldn’t have been cut. Similarly, Patrisse’s high school girlfriend, Cheyenne, dropped out of school because she didn’t have money to take the bus or pay for lunch. In Patrisse’s mind, this had nothing to do with Cheyenne’s commitment to her studies but much more to do with poverty—something Cheyenne couldn’t control or escape from. The politics of personal responsibility touch so many areas of Patrisse’s life—her family members and community feel guilty and responsible for actions that they were forced into due to a variety of external forces acting on them at all times. Patrisse uses these examples to show that the choices people make are often more complex than they might appear on the surface, and to argue that in order for people to make better choices, they need to have better choices presented to them to begin with.