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

by Patrisse Cullors

No white supremacist purveyor of violence has ever, to my knowledge, been labeled a terrorist by the state. Neither the slayers of Emmett Till nor the Ku Klux Klan bombers who extinguished the lives of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins before they could emerge from girlhood were ever charged with terrorism or officially referred to as terrorists.

write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people. SONIA SANCHEZ

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. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines. And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding. 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.

many jails that makes up the Los Angeles County jail system. It will be years, I will be grown, before she tells me what she saw, the child she bore, the one who loved animals and who once laughed easily, her big six-foot-two son, emaciated, more than 40 pounds gone from his suddenly frail frame. He is bruised and beaten. By who? My mother demands to know, but Monte won’t say. He is too scared to say. Years will pass before I learn that Monte was in a full-blown episode when he was taken to jail. He was hearing voices. His mind had been folded in on itself, and shaken brutally. The jail psychiatrist is the first to provide a diagnosis that explains why Monte has these mood swings, this erratic behavior: he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this. We learn it later, much later. After he is in prison. Way after. Like we will learn later that the sheriffs at the LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence.

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.

This is what he is really trying to 12-step around, he says to me one afternoon. An addiction to a lifestyle. He is working hard, once again, to hold himself accountable, which stirs the question in me: 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.

Older now, I know I am not only beginning to understand the complexity of human beings and society, but 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.

We tried pulling him closer to us, and my mother begged him to live with her, risking her Section 8 status. 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.

I wonder if heart meds are withheld from people, cancer meds, an asthma pump? We know Hep C treatments are. And naloxone, which can reverse an OD, has been. We certainly know meds that would slow the onset of AIDS have been kept out of reach of certain groups of people. What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?

It takes Monte 30, maybe 40 minutes to get out of the car. We wait. And slowly, slowly, I see Monte emerge from the car. He is walking gingerly, Paul on one side and Tremaine on the other. He has a towel over his head. They don’t let my brother stumble, they don’t let him fall. This is the image of Black men that lives in my head. This constructive care. This steady love.

And then my friend Alicia writes a Facebook post. Alicia, who I’d known for seven years at this point, who I’d met at a political gathering in Rhode Island where at the end of the day our goal was to dance until we couldn’t dance anymore. She and I danced with one another all night long and began a friendship that holds us together to this very day. But she writes these words in the wake of the acquittal: btw stop saying that we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER. And then I respond. I wrote back with a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter

the overwhelming majority of us spent a good portion of our time battling white supremacy, whether we knew it or not.

But even when they managed to fight and win their case, the legal barriers to reclaiming property were and are extraordinary, leaving the police, who were free to keep 80 percent of what they seized, to go on buying sprees. And what did they purchase most often? Military equipment. 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.

IT IS OUR DUTY TO FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM! IT IS OUR DUTY TO WIN! WE MUST LOVE EACH OTHER AND SUPPORT EACH OTHER! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!

grew up in a working-class neighborhood. My mother lived in Section 8 housing. I remember—I didn’t talk about this in the book, which is interesting—I remember using food stamps. And I think what’s important about being a child living in poverty and experiencing racism and discrimination is the shame that comes with it. It’s one thing to be discriminated against or to watch your mother unable to feed her children because she has to pay rent; it’s a whole other thing to manage the shame and humiliation that comes with that.

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. And so I hope that it shifts the hearts and minds of those who maybe have been peripherally involved but not really understood the fullness of the movement. I think this book is for everyone because no one is unaffected by that which Patrisse talks about.