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

by Patrisse Cullors

We lived a precarious life on the tightrope of poverty bordered at each end with the politics of personal responsibility that Black pastors and then the first Black president preached

We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists.

They will be silent in the way we often hear of the silence of rape victims. They will be worried, maybe, that no one will believe them.

Whatever goes through their minds after being half stripped in public and having their childhoods flung to the ground and ground into the concrete, we will never speak of this incident or the ones that will follow as Van Nuys becomes ground zero in the war on drugs and the war on gangs, designations that add even more license to police already empowered to do whatever they want to us.

Kids pour out of those vehicles, Mercedes and Lexuses, and run from waving parents onto the campus’s greener-than-green lawn, as all at once I become familiar with a sudden and new feeling taking root in my spirit: a shame that goes deep, that is encompassing and defining. I realize we are poor.

I don’t yet appreciate my mother’s own shame, the humbleness of our home.

Because despite the shame I feel within the walls of Millikan, away from there, it disappears to a large degree. This neighborhood, this world, is all I have known, it’s what I have loved, despite the hardship I don’t really know as hardship because it’s how everyone lives.

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.

but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.

We, our poverty and our music and our different foods and our reminders that they, the residents of our pretty adjacent neighborhood, were wealthy only at our expense, could not seep into the neat white world of Sherman Oaks.

Naomi wants nothing more for me than my joy—and safety—and part of knowing safety in a world bristling with hate is to create these protected centers of love. I feel powerful. I feel strong.

She teaches us Transcendental Meditation—and an abiding patience with young people who are still evolving.

The Strategy Center will provide a place where, for the first time in the whole of my life, I will be in a public space with both of my parents—the way I had always seen my white friends in public spaces with both of their parents.

He hates his meds and does everything he can to avoid taking them. In truth, they are overmedicating him but none of us know to question this back then, none of us understands this, not even Monte.

But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense. My father, a poor Southern boy, was made fun of all his life until he had money in his pocket and a product people wanted.

I am sure that the binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see how more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.

And this, I realize, is what his family cherishes in him. This total absence of judgment. He’s easygoing as hell, the original live-and-let-live man. His warmth runs over you like the waters in the hot springs of Central California, enveloping and clean and what you want more and more and more of.

What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?

My father who got cages instead of compassion. My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know.

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.

Whatever was going to happen would happen because of us, the family, and our capacity to manage severe mental illness. We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police.

What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time.

Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them?

Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?

Alton has opened a small mechanic shop, Seven Palms Automotive in Las Vegas, and Jasmine lets my mother know there are jobs and whole houses there that can be rented for cheaper than apartments in LA. I accept this, that my mother is leaving, but I cannot help think that the drug war, the war on gangs, has really been no more than a forced migration project. From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.

and before we can stop him, he is in the bathroom where he starts drinking from the toilet. A toilet, during part of his time in LA County Jail, was all he had to drink from. Monte is having a complete flashback, a PTSD-induced flashback.

there is a strong message about how the media has taught us to hate ourselves and how that hate leads to our death.

We talk about Black men and the performance of cool, about how brothers are supposed to take whatever the world throws at them and never be fazed. Never be shaken or afraid.

We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts—like possessiveness and jealousy—are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter.

I think about the numbers of Black women who suffer abuse at the hands of their husbands and lovers because calling the cops is a worse option than getting your ass kicked. In the Black/people of color Queer community, it’s even worse.

I am 11 when the police start picking up Monte, who is then 14, and putting him in juvie, for hanging out in the street, for underage drinking, for tagging—which gets him put on the National Gang Database.

torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity. It is designed to destroy a sense of community and eliminate leaders and create a climate of fear.

I begin to hyperventilate and remember my brother on his knees drinking out of the toilet. My God. I can’t breathe. We can’t breathe.

Suspensions, for example, did little to move young people to wholeness or better performance.

What must it be like to live hoping for and invested in war and crime because without them the people of Susanville must believe that the world would collapse?

Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.

Who is protected? Who is served? When I am asked to speak at universities, in communities, I share these statistics. I tell them that even as we are labeled criminal, we are actually the victims of crime. And

Did anyone in law enforcement ever say about one of our kids, “Jail would destroy him, so let’s find another way to help.” Did we ever get a first chance, let alone a second?

Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer?

We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.

and as far as I can tell, every single person within reach of my voice, and all of them white as far as I can see, puts down their champagne glass and their silver fork and stops checking their phone or having their conversation and then every last one of them bows their head.

We begin a list of local demands and add to the evolving national demands, which begin, not surprisingly, with slashing police budgets and investing in what actually keeps communities safe: jobs, good schools, green spaces.

Law enforcement had, for decades, been able to do anything they wanted to do because who would speak up for a bunch of poor Black people? Who cared?

At the moment Jim Crow’s back was broken, American politicians found myriad other ways—all legislated, all considered legal—to ensure that the terrorism that had always been the primary experience of Black people living in the United States continued. And for a long time it continued with the broad silence of the people most harmed, which is to say, us. We did not rise up in numbers as we were written off as thugs, crack hos, welfare queens. We used those terms ourselves! Our politicians and preachers used those terms!

the last part of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first century silenced us with false promises that if we just shut the fuck up and did what we were told, maybe we’d be Oprah or Puffy or LeBron, or, dare we say it, Barack Obama, when the truth was that the overwhelming majority of us spent a good portion of our time battling white supremacy, whether we knew it or not.

My God, I think. All the money put in to suppress a community. We’d need far less to ensure it thrived.

At some point, sisters begin to talk about how unseen they have felt, how the media has focused on men but it has been them, the sisters, who were there.

But in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done—and despite it being part of the historical record that it is always women who do the work, even as men get the praise—it takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters in the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.

could tell you it was painful to watch the story of Black Lives Matter told without us, but the truth is that it was enraging.

Yet as the work grows and people lose any hesitancy in saying that our lives matter and there are even folks in other countries looking to be part of what is becoming known broadly as the Black Lives Matter Movement, maintaining my closest relationship proves more of a challenge.