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

by Patrisse Cullors

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

He is saying that not only are we in the universe, but that the universe is in us. He is saying that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.

And I knew it because I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this built language and honored God and created movement and upheld love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?

And they preached that more than they preached about America having 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population, a population which for a long time included my disabled brother and gentle father who never raised a hand to another human being. And a prison population that, with extraordinary deliberation, today excludes the man who shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea.

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.

But that surprises me less than the fact that not only has he never been arrested, he’s never even feared arrest. When he tells me that, I try to let it sink in, living without fear of the police. But it never does sink in.

One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.

But when I am a girl, a teenager heading into my junior year in high school who is crying in my mother’s bedroom, I only know one thing. If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?

In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent.

License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.

Do words even exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures that approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like? This is why you tuck it away quietly in secret pockets. This is why you act like you are fine. This is why you go to school and pretend that algebraic equations that never add up to your father coming home make some kind of sense. This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions—that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school.

In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising.

The jail psychiatrist is the first to provide a diagnosis that explains why Monte has these mood swings, this erratic behavior: he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this. We learn it later, much later. After he is in prison. Way after. Like we will learn later that the sheriffs at the LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence. 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. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.

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.

Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and years that answer them.

How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?

This was Gabriel Brignac and I hold that flag that had covered his casket, this man who died of a broken heart in this nation of broken promises, and I think that if my father could not be possible in this America, then how is it that such a thing as America can ever be possible?

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?

They show us when they find money for another war but not for a decent hospital we can go to.

Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve. MALCOLM X

I can’t breathe. We can’t breathe.

A white man is questioned and then released after he shoots and kills an unarmed Black boy who was walking home.

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. Who is protected? Who is served?

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? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in this nation, the immeasurably wide margin of them by young, white men?

There are people close to us who are worried that the very term, Black Lives Matter, is too radical to use, alienating, even as we all are standing in the blood of Black children and adults.

There was the stunning public murder of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, in New York City, and there was his haunting callout: I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. 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.

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 have already learned from people in Palestine to douse our eyes with milk, not water, when attacked with tear gas.

Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.

And I think that it’s important to say that this is how racism and discrimination work. People who are most directly impacted by it believe that it’s their fault, and believe that we have to hide it or fix it—alone.