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

by Patrisse Cullors

The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority.

It was the 1990s and what was mostly said—in carefully chosen language—was that being born Black or Mexican was enough to label you a gang member, a dangerous drug-involved criminal.

A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang.

There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up.

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.

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

It’s the faith that drove us to run without maps or compasses, money or friends, with dogs trained by demons following behind. It’s the faith that sent four Black students, on February 1, 1960, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, to sit down at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refuse to move, risking bodily harm and their very lives. It’s the faith that allowed Robert Parris Moses to keep pushing for voting rights in the deep South in 1965 despite only being able to register one Black man that first summer in Amite County, Mississippi.

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.”

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal. DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK

Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain’t worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable.

despite the fact that cops were created in this nation specifically and solely to hunt Black people seeking freedom.

Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer?