When They Call You a Terrorist Quotes

“We actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. We care about justice.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“They gave him underwear, but no pants, their final fuck you,”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I learned I didn't matter from the very same place that lifted me up, the place I'd found my center and voice: school. And it will not be until I am an adult, determined to achieve a degree in religion, part of a long and dedicated process I undertook to become an ordained minister, that I will enjoy school again.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Being hungry is the hardest thing, & to this day I have prayers of gratitude for the Black Panthers, who made Breakfast for Children a thing that schools should do. We qualified for free lunch & breakfast, & without them I am almost sure we wouldn't have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I wonder if heart meds are withheld from people, cancer meds, an asthma pump? We know Hep C treatments are. And naloxone, which can reverse an OD, has been. We certainly know meds that would slow the onset of AIDS have been kept out of reach of certain groups of people. 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?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense. My father, a poor Southern boy, was made fun of all his life until he had money in his pocket and a product people wanted.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I cannot help think that the drug war, the war on gangs, has really been no more than a forced migration project. From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“My brother is hunched over. He is swollen from all the medication he’s on. He descends the bus steps in the clothes the prison gave him to return to us in: a thin muscle shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. They gave him underwear, but no pants, their final fuck you, you ain’t human to this man whom I have loved for all of my life. If we had not been there to scoop him right up, I’m sure Monte would have been picked up and sent back to some jail.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“We say we deserve another knowing, the knowing that comes when you assume your life will be long, will be vibrant will be healthy. We deserve to imagine a world without prisons and punishment, a world where they are not needed, a world rooted in mutuality. We deserve to at least aim for that.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“We agree there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not love, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, on that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“In the quest to create “safe schools,” students have become demoralized and criminalized. The presence of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, harsh ticketing policies, and prison-inspired architecture has created a generation of students, usually poor and of color, who are always under surveillance and always under suspicion. These modes of controlling spaces and the youth within them normalize expectations of criminality, often fulfilled when everyday violations of school rules lead to ticketing, suspension, or worse, court summons and eventual incarceration—a direct path into the criminal justice system.…”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry,”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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 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 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.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“What if we, all of us, had access to health care that centered on the patients, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgement, to one life mattering and another not?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background. He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police. I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter. They refuse. They disconnect the line. My mother and I go back and forth and decide we have no other choice. I call the local law enforcement office and explain everything. I beg them to go slow. I tell them Monte’s history with police because by now I know how he was beaten and tortured by LA County sheriffs. Two rookies arrive and they are young as fuck. I meet them downstairs. I ask them, What will you do if my brother gets violent? Monte’s never been violent but I am trying to prepare for anything. I’m—we’re—in a place we’ve never been. We’ll just taser him, one responds. No! My God! Absolutely not! I refuse to let them past me until they promise me they won’t hurt him, and when they finally do, I lead them into the apartment, explaining to Monte as I walk through the door, It’s okay. It’s okay. They’re just here to help. And my brother. My big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother, my brother who has rescued small animals and my brother who has never, never hurt another human being, drops to his knees and begins to cry. His hands are in the air. He is sobbing. Please don’t take me back. Please don’t take me back. I stop cold. I tell the police they have to leave and they do and I get down on the floor. I curl up next to Monte. I hold him as much as he’ll allow.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone a murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights, and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school--all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself.
We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?
That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. He has never been worth saving, never worth treatment.
No intervention beyond prison for this Black man from Louisiana.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir