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

by Patrisse Cullors

This is our life. This has always been our life. And while we live and we love and we laugh, there is also an unmitigated and unmitigating arc of pain that is there, has always been there, just below the surface. We suspect that things are not supposed to be this way but we aren’t sure what the other way is.

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.

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?

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

And if ever someone calls my child a terrorist, if they call any of the children in my life terrorists, I will hold my child, any child, close to me and I will explain that terrorism is being stalked and surveilled simply because you are alive. And terrorism is being put in solitary confinement and starved and beaten. And terrorism is not being able to feed your children despite working three jobs. And terrorism is not having a decent school or a place to play. I will tell them that what freedom looks like, what democracy looks like, is the push for and realization of justice, dignity and peace.