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

by Patrisse Cullors

There is rarely discussion about the trauma that often drives chaotic drug use and addiction. And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction. (For some drugs, like marijuana, fully 90 percent of those who use never become addicted.) They wake up, go to work or school, pay their taxes, raise their kids, make love with their partners. They live. They live regular old boring lives. But for my father, my brother, others I know, chaos was a factor before drugs were a part of their lives. Why does no one ever address that? Where we could see that other laws were race-based and aimed at disrupting Black life, we had—we still have—a hard time accepting drug policy as race policy and the war on drugs as the legal response to the gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm. After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupted families’ possibility to thrive—welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if between the two of them they still subsisted on poverty wages—our mothers and fathers and daug...