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

by Patrisse Cullors

Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.

Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards.

Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, 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 are each other’s harvest; We are each other’s business; We are each other’s magnitude and bond GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships … poverty and lack of human dignity.… The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion.…

They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions—that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school.

Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing.… Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society.… Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent.

There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 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

Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented with limited choices? My father attended schools that did little more than train him to serve another man’s dreams, ensure another man’s wealth, produce another man’s vision. The schooling available to my parents’ generation did not encourage creativity, the fostering of dreams, the watering of the seeds of hope. Only service.

He tells me what it was to come to LA from Louisiana when he was nine years old, a boy with the thick pull of Cajun Country in his voice and manner, marking him as other among children seeking tribe. He tells me about being bullied, about how he felt ugly for the whole of his life. He tells me how he cannot remember ever feeling good about himself. He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself.

If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment. He has to matter to me at this moment. Seeing him like this feels like my soul is being pulled over shards of glass but I do not turn away. His life is not expendable. Our love is not disposable. I

tell him that relapse is a part of recovery.

What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable? What is the impact of not being

subverting

If you have government housing benefits you cannot have anyone living with you if they’ve been convicted of a crime. Even if they are a juvenile. And even if they are incapable of caring for themselves because of an illness. And even if they cannot get a job because even the most low-level jobs won’t hire someone with a conviction. In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.

Unlike homicides that occur at the hands of non-police, when cops kill, there is the presumption that the killer is in the right, that his or her decision was reasoned and necessary and done in the name of public good and safety, not as a result of poor training and surely not as part of the long history of police violence rooted in racial hate—despite the fact that cops were created in this nation specifically and solely to hunt Black people seeking freedom. Some version of all this