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

by Patrisse Cullors

America having 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population,

We will remember that most of the cops who are killed in this nation are killed by white men who are taken alive.

The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know

That this has happened, but that she and her kids are all at home and, relatively speaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough. And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.

At the age of 12 I am on my own, no longer in the world as a child, as a small human, innocent and in need of support.

I saw it happen to my brothers and now it was happening to me, this moment when we become the thing that’s no longer adorable or cherished. The year we become a thing to be discarded.

For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory.

Twelve percent of us receive at least one suspension during our school careers while our white (girl) counterparts are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. In Wisconsin the rate is actually 21 percent for Black girls but 2 percent for white girls.

And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.

Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested.

My mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter, which don’t quite add up to one whole child.

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.

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.

He descends the bus steps in the clothes the prison gave him to return to us in: a thin muscle shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. They gave him underwear, but no pants, their final fuck you, you ain’t human to this man whom I have loved for all of my life.

My community of friends, this chosen family of mine, loves in a way that sets an example for love.

He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.

Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgment, to one life mattering and another not?

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

Will he be shot down and killed for walking while Black, and will his murder matter so little it doesn’t even make the news and no one will be held accountable?

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.

In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx.

Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders. DIANE NASH

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

Sandra Bland did not, did not, did not commit suicide. Sandra Bland believed that her Black life, that all of our Black lives, mattered.

Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman, shot and killed by Atlanta cops who were on a drug raid. They came in shooting and only later realized they got the address wrong.

Which side are you on my people, which side are you on? (We’re on the freedom side!)

If I die in police custody, know that they killed me. If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother. If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live.

In 2016, hate crimes in the United States rose 6 percent in 25 of the largest cities. And we, Black people, were the most common target of them, with hate crimes directed at us disproportionately, at nearly 30 percent, according to FBI statistics.

three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.

We actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. We care about justice. We care about bold leaders and actions. We care about human rights and common decency.

you are brilliant beings of light. You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the whole of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don’t even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like.

This is a book for anybody and everybody who cares about living in a world in which all of our children, all of our elders, all of humanity can survive.