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

by Patrisse Cullors

I carry the memory of living under that terror—the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity—in my blood, my bones, in every step I take. And yet I was called a terrorist. The members of our movement are called terrorists. We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists. We, the people. We are not terrorists. I am not a terrorist. I am Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac. I am a survivor. I am stardust.

the mass incarceration of first our fathers and later our mothers made our lives entirely unsafe. There were almost no adults who were there, present to love and nurture and defend and protect us. There was almost no one to say our dreams and our lives and our hopes mattered. And so we did it ourselves, the best way we knew how.

There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.

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

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?

How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society—to not take care of the least of these? More mentally ill people in our nation’s prisons than in all of our psychiatric hospitals—combined?! Human beings charged with all manner of terrible-sounding crimes—terrorism!—like my brother has been. What kind of society do we live in? And, like my brother, many have never harmed another being. And even those who have harmed others—what if there had been appropriate interventions, medical interventions, compassionate interventions, early on? What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgment, to one life mattering and another not?

One of the writers we studied together and loved was the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman. She offered these words in 1897, at the turn of a new century: “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”

And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter. They show us this in the schools most Black people attend where there are history books—history books—sometimes more than a generation old. They show us every time we drive through one of our neighborhoods that has no safe places for kids or grocery stores. They show us when they find money for another war but not for a decent hospital we can go to. They show us on TV and in the movies. They show us when we are arrested for standing together in the street. They show us relentlessly. Which is why we are determined to show ourselves something else. We are determined to love ourselves the best and most whole way we know.

I feel like I have to be the particular kind of strong Black people are always asked to be. The impossible strong. The strong where there’s no space to think about your own vulnerability. The space to cry.

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

We are a forgotten generation. Worse, we are a generation that has been written off. We’ve been written off by the drug war. We’ve been written off by the war on gangs. We’ve been written off by mass incarceration and criminalization. We’ve been written off by broken public schools and we’ve been written off by gentrification that keeps us out of the very neighborhoods we’ve helped build. We actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. We care about justice. We care about bold leaders and actions. We care about human rights and common decency. So there is no other place for me to be but here, where I can continue to help bring that into existence.

We have centered and amplified the voices of those not only made most vulnerable but most unheard, even as they are on the front lines at every hour and in every space: Black women—all Black women.