Ethan Freedman
WMST 202: Prof. Hill
April 11th, 2021
This title, while revealing, is almost too revealing as I did not grow up directly next to Patrisse Khan-Cullors, but rather across the line from her. My influence for writing this piece comes from the fact that in the news today, well the Daily Mail, there was a headline for “BLM founder is branded a FRAUD after buying $1.4 million home” (Alexander, H 2021). Clicking on the link, the name Patrisse Khan-cullors pops up and Alexander begins to tell those who desire to listen to gossip that Khan-cullors bought a house in Topanga Canyon. GASP!
Now I grew up in Los Angeles and I happen to know that Topanga Canyon was and is home to LA’s finest celebrities including the band members of Fleetwood Mac, Neil Diamond, Alice Cooper, Dennis Hopper, Molly Ringwald, and more. There are also a host of dead celebs such as Tom Petty as well as bands that took retreats to Topanga in order to record some of the greatest albums ever heard. It is opinionated, but the point is – Topanga is a top notch place for the rich and wealthy to have lots of land, live quietly, and not take the bullshit that Hollywood plates and serves to them. Mainly it is rich wealthy white folks that live there.
Alexander's article is an interesting one because in the simplest of forms, it seems to suggest that Khan-cullors bought a house with 1.4 million dollars taken out of BLM. This is at least what the title articulates. The piece actually delves into the fact that Khan-cullors is a self proclaimed “marxist” and that the community of BLM activists are angry because she is buying a house while others are buying cots for homeless black folks to sleep on. It moves on to critiquing her leadership of the BLM and ends with a controversial phrase from Alexander saying that “Cullors is yet to respond to my request for an interview”.
I am not here to criticise Khan-cullors for her decision to buy a house in Topanga and live amongst the wealthy who want a quiet life. If one were to ask me, I would say – go for it. You have worked your ass off for the last year and deserve some sort of reward. It is the same thing as finishing a school project and you reward yourself with a donut, but the job is not done for BLM and the donut is really fucking expensive.
Now for the real reason I am taking time to write this: For four years, I lived a couple blocks away from Khan-Cullors. On my way to my private school in Culver City, I would drive by a bus stop to Milliken. In her book When They Call You a Terrorist: a black lives matter memoir, she talks about her school and the privileged students that went there. My goal in this piece is to compare my life to hers.
“Millikin is the school where the gifted kids go” is a very funny phrase that the school communities in LA use because it is a common one (Cullors, 2018; pg 21). It doesn’t matter where you are from or where you go to school, if you know Millikan, you know it by this standard. To me this is interesting because where I lived is nothing like where she lived. It is the equivalent of that terrible phrase “across the tracks”.
I grew up in the “wealthy white neighborhood with big old houses that have two-car garages, landscape lawns and swimming pools that look nothing like the untended, postage-stamped-size one behind [Cullors’] apartment building” (C; pg.11). I literally cannot help but think of my house with the imagery she is providing. If not this house, I think of my step-grandfather’s house in the gated community blocks further down the road and my step-mother’s old home up the hill. Cullor’s aced it.
Countless times, Cullors talks about the violence on the streets in the valley and the “omnipresent” police in her life. I don’t have it the same. The gunshots I hear at night from outside my window, open to let cool air come into it despite the air conditioning running, are just sounds in the night. I sleep soundly in my wasted airspace of a room for reasons Cullors and my Women’s Studies 202 class helped me to understand. Those gunshots, while a familiar sound, don't have me worried because they are not targeted at me or anyone I know. There is no fear in the night that my white friends are getting shot in a drive by or beaten by the police. I am blocks away from Cullors, but the thoughts in my mind are very different. The gunshots coming from neighborhoods that look like hers don’t phase the white faced neighborhood I come from.
This is the luxury that Cullor’s helps me to acknowledge that I have. The world that we both live in was built by people that look, sound, and act like me. In this way I benefit from the society that I live in. The stigmas that surround my body are stigmas that are seemingly harmless to my body. In fact, they are often beneficial to my body.
To go back to a sad day where marajauna use was illegal, I was not a suspect for holding drugs. I, a white man who, just like the rest of LA folks, roams the streets looking for fun things to do, places to eat, people to see, have “never even feared arrest” (C; p. 17). Take this hypothetical: I, a white man with a nice car, I'm driving down Van Nuys, a street Cullors and I know very well and know that it is highly populated by police. In my car is some Mary Jane (Tom Petty also lived in Topanga) for me and my friends. Not one time would a man like me think “oh shit it’s the cops.” While this is a hypothetical, it is the reality for the people my age that I know and love. They deal, they buy, they use, but the white man doesn’t fear getting caught. At least not the Sherman Oaks one because their world is a world of luxury. My world in LA is an absolute bubble of luxury.
I got it good in LA and I know it, but Cullors helped me to understand what is actually going on in this world. I am blind to reality because I am enclosed in a bubble that is my safe white community. In the end, I am not really sure why it is that I wrote this piece. I said multiple times something along the lines of “this piece is for…” but here I am and I have no idea what it is for. If I had to pick, it would be to say a tiny bit of a fuck you to those who are criticising Patrisse for buying a house, in a quiet and safe LA area. Yes it is capitalistic and going against her values, but Cullors deserves to feel what I felt at night when I was sleeping. Topanga only ever had gunshots in it when the Manson Family lived there. Now it is as quiet as ever and I am happy Patrisse Khan-Cullors gets to live in peace.
Bibliography
Alexander, H. (2021, April 10). BLM founder is branded a FRAUD after buying a $1.4 million home. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9456145/Shell-pick-white-people-complain-BLM-founder-buys-1-4M-LA-home.html
Khan-Cullors, P., & Bandele, A. (2018). When they call you a terrorist: A black lives matter memoir (First edition). St. Martin’s Press.
Acknowledgements:
While it is not necessary to do this for this paper, I would like to acknowledge my peers in WMST 202A for their terrific ideas in discussions and overall input in the class. While I did not use any of zos’ ideas in this essay, zos’ contributions helped me to formulate my own ideas which have been sewn into the essay above.
Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge that much of the resources I have been using as well as the facilities that I have benefited from are located at Colgate University. Colgate University is situated on the Oneida Nation’s land, one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee people.
I am also here to say that I don’t really know what the fuck this paper was or is. In retrospect, it feels like something I just needed to write considering as I read her memoir, all I could think about was I knew everything Cullors was talking about, but there was some kind of safety or something that I had cloaked over me. Anyways, this is just a rough piece of writing that I have shared with you, that I decided to write after the news article about her came out.