Memoirs of one of the three women who founded #BlackLivesMatter, with a focus on growing up in what was essentially a police occupied part of LA during the War on Drugs. She spent a lot of time talking about police interaction with her and her family, especially her brother who had mental health problems and was in and out of jail most of his life instead of getting treatment. The second part was more about her highschool years, and her growing activism as a community organiser and then as one of the founders of BLM, with a lot of attention to the facts, statistics and theory behind her political views.

It's a pretty solid piece of polemic in that regard, that starts out with a quote by Assata Shakur and an intro by Angela Davis, in case you're wondering what political ground on which we've landed. A lot of it felt very tied in with the history of the Black Panther Party that I read last year, and this seemed to me a guns-free continuation of the work they were trying to do.

What probably interested me a little more was the way that Khan-Cullors works at integrating her political beliefs into her family life, and the way she's struggled to understand how her family (especially the repeated incarceration and deaths of her male relatives) has been shaped by politics. She talks a lot about the difficulty of maintaining relationships when struggling with family problems and the pressure of being an activist, she talks about how to raise a kid in this world, she talks about being queer and dating men, and what marriage means. Honestly, she seems really smart, and really cool, and the kind of person you'd want to hang out with.

Would highly recommend for contemporary history. I was definitely pretty fuzzy on the details when it came to the origins of BLM, and this lays it out nicely.