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

by Patrisse Cullors

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.

The racially discriminatory sentencing imbalance between crack and powder cocaine has not yet been addressed.

This, more than anything, was the evolution of gangs in Van Nuys. The groups of kids they first called gangs were really young people who were friends, they were my friends, and they took a defensive posture against what looked and felt like an actual advancing army that came in on foot and came in police cars for which the county had appropriated ever more dollars to patrol us with. And worse than the cars, most frightening of all, were the helicopters overhead. At all hours of day and night they hovered above us, shone lights into the midnight, circling and surveilling, vultures looking for the best next prey.

And the gang statutes were written so broadly that even members of Congress, under their definition, could have been arrested.

One of the most troubling aspects is that they often give police overly-broad discretion to label people gang members without having to present any evidence or even charge someone with a crime. Police are left to rely on things like what someone looks like, where they live, and who they know. As a result, there is a great potential for racial profiling, with a particular impact on young people of color. Despite the documented existence of white gangs, no California gang injunction has targeted a white gang.

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.

felons, dude, get the hell out. We tried pulling him closer to us, and my mother begged him to live with her, risking her Section 8 status. If you have government housing benefits you cannot have anyone living with you if they’ve been convicted of a crime. Even if they are a juvenile. And even if they are incapable of caring for themselves because of an illness. And even if they cannot get a job because even the most low-level jobs won’t hire someone with a conviction. In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.

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.)

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.

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. 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.”

Suspensions, for example, did little to move young people to wholeness or better performance. And they were used for even the most minor of offenses—being “disrespectful” was a common cause. Black children were far more at risk, suspended at nearly four times the rate of white students despite similar behavior patterns. Black children taught by white teachers were particularly at risk for suspension, the data showed again and again. (Although the reverse was not true. Black teachers did not move to suspend white children at higher rates.)

We knew it when Oscar Grant was killed in Oakland, sitting still and compliant on the floor of the Fruitvale BART station. We knew it when Amadou Diallo was killed. Forty-one bullets. Some through the bottom of his feet. We knew it when Sean Bell was shot and killed getting into a car after his own bachelor party in New York.

We knew it when we read about Clifford Glover, a boy of ten living in Queens, New York, in April 1973. Little Clifford was shot by police while simply walking with his stepfather down a street in their South Jamaica, Queens, neighborhood. The killer cop,

Because in Ferguson, like in cities across America, not only could the police extort Black people through the citation process for minor infractions, they also had at their disposal the huge unwieldy set of laws that made up what is known as asset forfeiture, a three-billion-dollar industry invented as part of the architecture of the drug war. 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.

Military equipment.