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

by Patrisse Cullors

universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender, and class hierarchies but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions.

a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly.

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 will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.

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. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

“I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”