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

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.

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.

Oppression is embarrassing, she will say quietly. But in middle school, segregated as it is, between Black and white kids, wealthy and poor kids, I don’t quite know what to do with this feeling or the terrible question that encircles my 12-year-old soul: Am I supposed to be embarrassed about the people who nurtured me, who gave me to the world and gave the world to me?

For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory.

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

Twelve. And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I had been so ready to learn. So willing. Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested. Twelve, and childhood already gone. Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives. It cost Tamir Rice his life. He was a child of twelve. And the cop who shot him took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir should die. Tamir Rice. Twelve. Twelve, and out of time.

He always returns to truth and honesty.

Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.

I’m not here to take you away from anyone, he tells me more than once. I’m just here to add to your life in a way that’s good and useful. I believe him.

Children so rarely get to see adults be so honest and open and accountable in a way that is grounded, not reactionary.

There are no school counselors to speak to who can help me understand all that I am feeling. But there are friends and I pull them close and I pull them tight.

When my mother was a teenager and pregnant, she was immediately disassociated from the religion—and from her family. The religion took precedence over the love and support she must have needed from her mother, her father. Thrown out of her home, she was not even allowed to speak to her parents or siblings. The religion was more important than a scared 16 year old or us, her children, who were often hungry and often without but were not allowed to ask our own family for help. My mother’s family was not rich, but neither were they wanting. We were allowed the privilege to come and to pray but not to participate in fellowship or even say hello to other members of Kingdom Hall, except the Elders, no matter the relationship.

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For four years I have watched my father in faith-based processes where he could own his choices and still be embraced, still be loved. And that practice, that coming together, that speaking the truth of your life from a place beyond shame and having it heard from a place beyond judgment, it didn’t just change my father. It changed we who were witnesses. It changed me who was a witness. And a thought occurs to me after my mother is reinstated. When was she ever given such grace? Was she ever given such grace? Had she ever lived and been free in even the smallest corner of the world where she was not judged and shamed? Was this the place that could offer her or any one of us this?

depression is the predictable outcome when people are forced to deny their humanity.

Because that’s what happened in the wake of the horrific school shooting in a town that was mostly white in a school that was mostly white. Black and Brown kids across the country got police in their schools, complete with drug-sniffing dogs, bars on the windows and metal detectors. Years on,

We, Cheyenne and I, feel the world can go to hell. We love each other.

thick as thieves, besties for real, just as we are

She is the first adult who doesn’t think who we are, how we live and love, needs anything but support, some architecture. She understands our, Carla’s and mine, emerging idea of building intentional family, a concept that I suppose will later become the basis of our theory of change. To outsiders—in many cases outsiders

us they were oxygen and still are. And although

One afternoon I listen to a young man speak in the group of 30 young people who identify as Queer. We are speaking about homophobia and the specific pain it causes, the deep depression it’s wrought. We talk about what it’s meant for so many of us to have been forced out of our homes by our parents. We talk about the rampant homelessness among us, the hunger, the isolation. And then this young brother says he doesn’t expect he has long to live. He tells us he is 18 and has been diagnosed HIV positive and with that there is a grief in the room that cannot be contained. We grieve for him and we grieve because if we weren’t aware of it before, now we cannot turn away: we live in a world where hatred is so deep that adults are fine ensuring death sentences for us young people who have done nothing but be in the world who we were born to be. We resolve to fight back.

He is working hard, once again, to hold himself accountable, which stirs the question in me: Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented with limited choices? My father attended schools that did little more than train him to serve another man’s dreams, ensure another man’s wealth, produce another man’s vision. The schooling available to my parents’ generation did not encourage creativity, the fostering of dreams, the watering of the seeds of hope. Only service.

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 says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself.

What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?

I will not be to him what the world has been to him. I will not throw him away. I will not say he has nothing to offer.

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?

What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money?

leadership was our responsibility.

year we won a fight against the school district for fining parents $250 each time their child was late to school—even if they were late because the lines to get through the metal detectors were unconscionably long.

from my intentional family—Mark Anthony and Carla, Naomi and Tanya and Jason and Sarah and Katidia and Vitaly and more people than I can name here, I learned that nothing could break a community united, a community guided by love. From them, I learned to reimagine a world. A world where my own family can be safe. A world where Monte can be safe. I learned that I am not alone no matter how lonely I’d felt at times.

On our final day in Ferguson, and in response to the community, we host a discussion on patriarchy in the Movement. Darnell pulls it together. He knows that even as a Gay, feminist Black man, he will be granted more space than he has earned, he says. We speak with organizers from the area who have gathered there and talk about what it means to step back, what it means to be an ally. Meanwhile, Mark Anthony, Prentis Hemphill and Adaku Utah have converted the basement of the church to a healing justice space, and people who have been protesting for weeks walk into a room lit low with candles where a crew of healers is at the ready to provide massage, acupuncture and talk therapy. There is an art station where people can paint and draw what they cannot name or speak. There is an altar for people who have passed. There are pillows for people to rest on. We refuse to allow anyone or anything to make us less than wholly human. And in the fullness of our humanity, we need this, too, along with protests, and the deep discussions and policy pushes and theory, a place to rest, to renew. A place to restore.

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.