When They Call You a Terrorist Quotes

“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

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

“And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“We are firm in our conviction that our lives matter by virtue of our birth, and by virtue of the service we have offered to people, systems and structures that did not love, respect or honor us. And while we are cultivating this idea in our respective meetings and our respective teams, we, Alicia, Opal and I, do not want to control it. We want it to spread like wildfire.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Our nation, one big damn Survivor reality nightmare.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

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

“The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old.

One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupt families' possibility to thrive, welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if, between the two of them, they still subsisted on poverty wages. Our mothers and fathers and daughters and sons were criminalized for choices made out of absolute desperation and lack of any other real options.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“When Monte came home after we were able to get him stable after weeks in the hospital, he wanted nothing more than to be a self-sufficient man in the world, but the cycling in and out of juvie in his childhood, or drinking, or tagging, or just standing on a street with his boys. And then, of course, the time in prison meant that he had never had a single job in his life, save for any forced labor when he was locked up.

We helped him get a low-wage low-level job at a local Rite Aid. Carla and I had both done our time at Rite-Aids in LA, and I still remember his excitement at the end of the first day. "Trisse, I got this." He was so deeply proud.

But a week into his very first paid position, he was promptly fired. His background check had come back: no ex-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 to housing to food bans, school financial aid bans, and the list goes on.

You can have a two year sentence, but it does not mean you're not doing life.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“He kept coming back and he kept trying. My father kept fucking trying. This man—my father—Gabriel Brignac, who loved me deeply and fiercely—he spent every moment with me telling me how my Black life mattered.

This was my father, the bones and the blood and the soul of him.

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?”
― 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 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. 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 of the 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 Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Unlike homicides that occur at the hands of non-police, when cops kill, there is the presumption that the killer is in the right, that his or her decision was reasoned and necessary and done in the name of public good and safety, not as a result of poor training and surely not as part of the long history of police violence rooted in racial hate—despite the fact that cops were created in this nation specifically and solely to hunt Black people seeking freedom.”
― Patrisse Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.”
― Patrisse 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. 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.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I am here, today, a mother and a wife, a community organizer and Queer, an artist and a dreamer learning to find hope while navigating the shadows of hell.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“And who exactly gave that description? What other proof did they have? How did they know you were even sleeping in that bed, since the cottage is not in your name but your wife's? How is this different from tactics used by the SS, the KGB, the Tonton Macoutes? And who is the real criminal, the real terrorist, and how will they be held accountable? To this day, the stench of these questions lingers, the stench of rotting meat unaddressed, unanswered.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“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

“It will be more than a decade before I meet the advocate and scholar Deborah Small, who will say that this is a nation founded on addiction - the production of rum and other alcohols, tobacco, sugar. And now, she will say, they put people in prison for it.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

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

“All of us need more than we are given or could possibly access. Hell, our parents need more than they are given or could access. Naomi eventually moves in with her father, which alleviates much of the harm she lived with. Cousin James is gentle and accepting and his love helps quell the depression that has settled deeply inside her. Depression rates run high among those of us who are out, and for those of us rejected by our families, the national statistics report we are 8.4 times as likely to attempt suicide. It is not a time when Love is Love is Love is Love is a movement coming in to rescue us.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“We are encouraged to challenge racism, sexism, classism and heteronormativity. We are encouraged to ask, How do you know what you think you know?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“And it didn’t matter how poorly conceived and executed the gang statutes were, what with their siphoning off of millions and millions and millions of dollars into police departments and away from everything that any rational parent or adult knows a young person needs in order to succeed—good schools, creative outlets, arts”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us. And the propaganda, the rationalizing of how much we needed to be destroyed, we the generation called super-predators, was promoted by people who were Republican and Democrat, and, save for a few, Black as well as white. It was such convenient reasoning: the hoisting of responsibility on the narrow, non-voting shoulders (and after too many busts, never-voting shoulders) of 13 year olds, 14, 15 and 16 year olds, thereby absolving grown people of any responsibility themselves. As soon as you said drugs, as soon as you said gangs, you didn’t have to talk about what it meant to throw a bunch of adolescents together in a community with no resources, no outlets, no art classes, no mentorship, no love but from their families who were being harmed, cut daily, themselves.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“With no education plan for us or thought about us becoming arbiters of our own destiny or self-determining contributors to an economy designed to reward only a few, the only plan left for us was prison or death.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us. The record was clear.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“I wish right then we would simply say I love you a million times but we don’t. It isn’t what we come from. We say nothing and just eat and are silent.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“From love we come, to love we must return”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“On November 9, there was nothing I could do to stop this man from being president.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“How is this different from tactics used by the SS, the KGB,”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir