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

by Patrisse Cullors

In my home, we, mostly women, talk about what we deserve. We say we deserve another knowing, the knowing that comes when you assume your life will be long, will be vibrant, will be healthy. We deserve to imagine a world without prisons and punishment, a world where they are not needed, a world rooted in mutuality. We deserve to at least aim for that.

with the ever-present helicopters hovering over us, I say that they, those who come for brunch, have to confront the police presence today but that this is our everyday. I say that we were not born to bury our children, we were born to love and nurture them just like they were, and, because of this, finally we had to acknowledge that in fact this is what we had been forced to do and we had been forced to do it for too long, for centuries too long.

I ask the people who are lunching, perhaps spending more on a single lunch than many of us spend to feed our families for an entire week, to remember the dead and to remember that once they were alive and that their lives mattered. They mattered then and they matter now.

But I ask again for a moment of remembrance for Trayvon, 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 know that if we can get the nation to see, say and understand that Black Lives Matter, then every life would stand a chance. Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human.

there is something quite basic that has to be addressed in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that Black people are not fully human.

Another way of saying this is that the police in Ferguson stole from the residents and then used that money to buy the tanks, tear gas and machine guns that on August 9 would be turned against those very same residents.

All the money put in to suppress a community. We’d need far less to ensure it thrived.

The protests in Ferguson are around the clock and by 10:00 A.M. our people—including Black journalists like Brittney Cooper, Akiba Solomon and Jamilah Lemieux—are out there with them, standing shoulder to shoulder against the tanks, the machine guns. We have already learned from people in Palestine to douse our eyes with milk, not water, when attacked with tear gas.

We talk about Trayvon and some of us talk about our little brothers. Some women talk about their lovers and remember Oscar Grant. Some talk about their fathers and remember Eric Garner.

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