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

by Patrisse Cullors

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.” This is what it is like every day. Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing. This is to say that for a long time and for all the structural analysis I was learning about race and the world, at the end of the day, I was still just a teenager with a heart left broken. But then one day that summer, I don’t hear from Mark Anthony. We had been in the habit of talking not once but throughout the day, the days. I call him and call him but there’s no answer. This is before the age of texting and many of us do not have cell phones. So I call a landline that rings until it rings out. Mark Anthony is totally a ghost.