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When They Call You a Terrorist Quotes
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
by
Patrisse Khan-Cullors25,156 ratings, 4.49 average rating, 3,409 reviews
When They Call You a Terrorist Quotes
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“What is the impact of not being valued?
How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“The binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see that more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon,”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“He loves as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“My father who got cages instead of compassion.
My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know.
What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm - hand behind your back, N****r. Get on the fucking wall, N****r! Lift your sac, N****r. Don't look at me like that or I will fg kill your Black ass.
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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know.
What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm - hand behind your back, N****r. Get on the fucking wall, N****r! Lift your sac, N****r. Don't look at me like that or I will fg kill your Black ass.
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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“At some point, sisters began to talk about how unseen they have felt. How the media has focused on men, but it has been them - the sisters - who were there. They were there, in overwhelming numbers, just as they were during the civil rights movement.
Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community�. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear�.
But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition�. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started.
The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.
The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement.
Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community�. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear�.
But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition�. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started.
The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.
The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement.
Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“He tells me how he cannot remember ever feeling good about himself. 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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to out 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 and institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“When I speak at universities, in colleges, I share these statistics. I tell them that even as we are labeled criminal, we are actually the victims of crime. And I tell them there are no stats to track collateral deaths, the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that becomes cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke . Slow deaths . Undocumented deaths. Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain't worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“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.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Could it be that we matter?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“I do not remember ever going to a movie with my mother, window shopping. I do not remember us as relaxed, as humans being. We have always had to be humans doing.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― 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 matterâ€� - Patrisse Khan Cullers”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Days after the elections of 2016, asha sent me a link to a talk by
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says
to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We
listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and
molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of
stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas
clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right
mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our
own, but also people, including us, me and her. 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 know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is
telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic,
the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.
I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah's Witness and a
woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping
other people's children, working the reception desks at gyms,
telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the
whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My
mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the
children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother,
never giving up despite never making a living wage.
I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun
country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world
that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My
father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a
version of himself there were no mirrors for.
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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says
to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We
listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and
molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of
stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas
clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right
mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our
own, but also people, including us, me and her. 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 know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is
telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic,
the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.
I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah's Witness and a
woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping
other people's children, working the reception desks at gyms,
telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the
whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My
mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the
children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother,
never giving up despite never making a living wage.
I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun
country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world
that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My
father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a
version of himself there were no mirrors for.
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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.â€� [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 They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. JAMES A. BALDWIN”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“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.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“If I die in police custody, know that they killed me. If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother. If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“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?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“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,e each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“We know that if we can get the nation to see, say and understand the Black Lives Matter, then every life would stand a chance. Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human. Which is not to erase any group's harm to ongoing pain in particular the genocide carried out against the Fist Nations peoples. But it is to say that there is something quite basic that has to be addresses in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that Black people are not fully human.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinity of emotion: rage, grief of guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― 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.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“Clinton had a universe of faults but under her administration we likely wouldn't have seen married people being picked up and separated by border patrol. Health care, including Planned Parenthood, which is the only access to prenatal and gynecological health care many poor women have at all, wouldn't be at risk. The Paris Climate Accord wouldn't have been tossed out. We wouldn't be going the other way on mass incarceration, prison privatization and the drug war. We wouldn't be facing the rebirth of the old Jim Crow.
Which is not to say that a Clinton presidency would have meant peace and justice for all. It wouldn't have. She would have pushed an agenda that elevated the American Empire in terrible ways. But the loss of even the most compromising of agreements, accords and legislation means that we are starting from negative numbers. It means that we can't focus on pushing for something far better than the ACA -- like single-payer health care -- but that we have to fight for even the most basic of rights.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
Which is not to say that a Clinton presidency would have meant peace and justice for all. It wouldn't have. She would have pushed an agenda that elevated the American Empire in terrible ways. But the loss of even the most compromising of agreements, accords and legislation means that we are starting from negative numbers. It means that we can't focus on pushing for something far better than the ACA -- like single-payer health care -- but that we have to fight for even the most basic of rights.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough.”
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
― When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
