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

by Patrisse Cullors

When people ask me how we got through that moment, that time, how we managed it all, I tell them about my mother, Cherice. I tell them about a woman who worked from can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night. I tell them about a woman whose own family had disavowed her but who refused to be a person who disavowed anyone in return. My mother wove us together, my brothers, sister and I, into a tight and strong complex quilt and she called it us and it was, and it is, us.

It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says.

He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.

And we whisper to each other how much we love each other, we say I love you 1,000 times. And we say we have hope and we say we have faith. And then slowly we give in to our magnificent, beautifully earned love informed by two souls that are exhausted but sated and certain in the knowledge that yes, while there is so much hell on this earth, so much pain, there is also this. A love we could not have predicted but always imagined. A love that rocks us and a love that holds us. A love not ordinary.

We know we want to develop something. We know we want whatever we create to have global reach. Alicia reaches out to her friend Opal Tometi, a dedicated organizer who is running Black Alliance for Just Immigration, based in Brooklyn, New York. Opal is a master communicator and develops all the initial digital components we need to even get people to feel comfortable saying the words Black Lives Matter, for even among those closest to us, there are many who feel the words will be viewed as separatist, that they will isolate us. Opal pulls together the architecture for our first website and Twitter accounts, our Facebook and Tumblr. We are determined to take public this basic concept: That our lives mean something. That Black Lives Matter.

Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.

In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx. Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police.

In Oakland, Alicia leads protesters through the downtown business area, where they are set upon by police. The media ignores the hundreds of people who are still in pain from the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009 and who are peacefully marching. Instead they focus on one or two who are not peaceful and they wholly ignore law enforcement, who attack everyone.

These moments, in particular Mr. Garner’s murder because it was videoed by bystanders and went viral, animate our pain and rage and resolve but we still are speaking of the killings in individual terms. Each its own horrific, not yet seen as part of a movement that says Black Lives Do Not Matter.

Mike Brown, who in so many ways reminds me of Monte. Size, color, age when the police came for him to kill him: these all read as my brother. These stories read as unique, as shocking to so many in this country, but to the people I know, these are the public assaults—when they are not outright executions—of our family, of the people who loved and nurtured us. I know it could always have been my brother left there on a street for hours, not only killed by a cop, but dishonored by a force of them.

Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade. They needed no proof or indictment even to seize cash, cars and homes, and police across the nation routinely did, leaving the burden of evidence on the person who was robbed. The victim had to prove that they had never done anything, something almost impossible to do. But even when they managed to fight and win their case, the legal barriers to reclaiming property were and are extraordinary, leaving the police, who were free to keep 80 percent of what they seized, to go on buying sprees. And what did they purchase most often? Military equipment. Another way of saying this is that the police in Ferguson stole from the residents and then used that money to buy the tanks, tear gas and machine guns that on August 9 would be turned against those very same residents.

We rent a car and drive to Ferguson, which is like driving into an occupied zone. Law enforcement from multiple municipalities is there. The National Guard is there. There are tanks on street corners. Even Los Angeles with its constant cop drive-bys and helicopters does not prepare me for this. My God, I think. All the money put in to suppress a community. We’d need far less to ensure it thrived. Where are the politicians who are doing that?

It is women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying We have a right to raise our children without fear. But it’s not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says, when the police move in, we do not run. We stay. And for this, we deserve recognition.

I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it. TONI MORRISON

For years, I’ve neglected my own health and caretaking. If I struggled with intimacy in my romances, I also struggled with it when it came to myself. I resolve, in the wake of the Trump presidency, to end that, too. I begin working out again, four times a week. I start cooking more. I am traveling less and spending time in prayer each day. And I include fun in my life, joy to counteract this hate-filled world. I go to the arcade with friends. I roller skate. I designate park days. It’s the Gabriel in me, the Brignac in me.

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. And I will say that to my precious Shine, or Malik, or Nisa, or Nina or any of the children and young people we cherish and lift up, that you are brilliant beings of light. You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the whole of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don’t even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like.