When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

by Patrisse Cullors

What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … black, but by getting the public to associate the … blacks with heroin … and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities … Did we know we were lying? Of course we did. JOHN EHRLICHMAN, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. JAMES A. BALDWIN

How do you know what you think you know?

I am changing, my whole life is changing, and for all the parts that feel terrifying and hard, there are other parts, many of them, that feel incredibly exciting and bursting with possibility. The possibility of becoming my truest self.

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.

If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment.

Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.