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

by Patrisse Cullors

The human beings legislated as not human beings

I was not expected or encouraged to survive.

They even tore through our drawers. Did they think my uncle was hiding in the dresser drawer?

We are a family of survivors and a family of doers, but we are not a family of talkers. We do not process, my family, we do not take it all down to the bones of it.

Later, when I am home, none of my siblings will ask me how it went.

there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.

A generation of human beings, Black women, Black children and Black men, including my father and eventually my brother, who are viewed as having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners.

It’s hard for me to think of a boy in my neighborhood who didn’t spend time in juvenile hall, or wasn’t arrested at least once.

White supremacy implies black inferiority.

bars on the outside are as thick and real as the bars on the inside.

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.

All of us need more than we are given or could possibly access. Hell, our parents need more than they are given or could access.

What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?

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

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.

And then he was charged with terrorism. Literally.

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?

Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them?

I do not remember us together as relaxed, as humans being. We have always had to be humans doing.

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.

this is what community control looks like. This is what the love of Black men looks like. This is what our Black yesterday once looked like. And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.

We have the innate sense that we can change the world, that everything that is hard and cruel doesn’t have to stay that way.

The war on drugs has done an incredible job of demonizing the people we need and love the most, of making someone’s use of drugs solely a matter of personal responsibility and weakness.

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.”

Male guards participated in torture. Female guards participated in torture. Everyone knew what was happening. Medical staff knew what was happening. The sheriff knew what was happening.

We call our organization Dignity and Power Now. And in 2016 we establish the first civilian oversight board of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

He stood his ground. He said it was their responsibility to talk about sexual assault, their duty to force people to think about

women’s sexual organs differently. He said women were powerful and ought to be honored as such.

Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx.

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.

Could it be that we matter?

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

the BLM network has health and wellness directors dedicated to ending toxicity in our own organizations.