Like many of the people who embody our movement, I have lived my life between the twin terrors of poverty and the police. Coming of age in the drug war climate that was ratcheted up by Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the neighborhood where I lived and loved and the neighborhoods where many of the members of Black Lives Matter have lived and loved were designated war zones and the enemy was us.
The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know if you cannot readily imagine how someone can be doing no harm and yet be harassed by police. Literally breathing while Black became cause for arrest—or worse.
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.
1
COMMUNITY, INTERRUPTED
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be . . . black, but by getting the public to associate the . . . blacks with heroin . . . and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities . . . Did we know we were lying? Of course we did.
JOHN EHRLICHMAN, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE
My mother, Cherice, raises us—my older brothers Paul and Monte, my baby sister Jasmine, and me—on a block that is the main strip in my Van Nuys, California, mostly Mexican neighborhood. We live in one of ten Section 8 apartments in a two-story, tan-colored building where the paint is peeling and where there is a gate that does not close properly and an intercom system that never works.
My mother and I are considered short in our family. She is five feet four inches, and I never get any taller than five feet two. But Jasmine, Paul and Monte are tall people, and by the time she is grown, my little sister will reach six feet. My brothers will also both soar up to well over six feet. They get it from our father, Alton Cullors, a mechanic with big, dark brown hands he uses to work the line at the GM plant in Van Nuys, hands that hold me, hug me and make me feel safe. He smells of gasoline and cars, smells that still make me think of love and snuggles and safety almost three decades on. Alton comes in and out of our home, in and out of our days, depending on how he and Mommy are getting along. By the time I am six, he will leave and never live with us again. But he won’t disappear entirely from our lives, and his love won’t disappear at all. It lingers, that good Alton Cullors love, inside me, beside me, even now, today.
Where we live is multiracial, although by far the majority of people are Mexican. But there are Korean people and Black people like us, and even one white woman who is morbidly obese and cannot bathe in the tub the apartments in our buildings provide. I watch her sneak down to the dilapidated swimming pool attached to our apartment building, the one I will learn to swim in. Each night when she thinks no one is looking, she bathes in the water, bath soap, washcloth, shampoo and all. She never knows I see her and I never say. Not only because she is an adult and I am a child. But because she is part of who makes us, us.
She is poor and raising her daughter alone. She has a fast kind of mouth that reminds me of the quick-tongued Black women in my own family. She wears muumuus. I miss her presence when she leaves, as she eventually does, like most of our neighbors. Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient, not a place where roots are meant to take hold, meant to grow into trees that live and live. The only place in my hood to buy groceries is a 7-Eleven. Without it, George’s liquor store, the small Mexican and Chinese fast-food spots and the Taco Bell we would have nowhere in our neighborhood to get something to eat or drink.
But less than a mile away is Sherman Oaks, a wealthy white neighborhood with big old houses that have two-car garages, landscaped lawns and swimming pools that look nothing like the untended, postage-stamp-size one behind our apartment building. In Sherman Oaks, there is nothing that does not appear beautiful and well kept. There aren’t even apartment buildings.
There are just expansive homes with fancy cars in front of them and parents who leave their houses each morning and drive their kids to school, a phenomenon that catches my eye the first time I see it. Mine is a neighborhood of kids who take the bus to school or walk from the time we are in first grade. Our parents are long gone to work by the time we emerge, little multicolored peepers in the springtime, our fresh brown faces trying to figure out a world we did not make and did not know we had the power to unmake.
My own mother worked 16 hours a day, at two and sometimes three jobs. She never had a career, only labored to pull together enough to make ends meet. Telemarketer, receptionist, domestic support, office cleaner—these were the jobs my mom did and all were vital to us, especially after the Van Nuys GM plant shut down and our family’s stability did too, right along with it.
Alton got a series of low-wage jobs that had no insurance, no job security and no way to take care of us, his family, which is why I think, looking back now, he left, and while he visited and was always there, it was never the same again. In the 1980s, when all this was going down, unemployment among Black people, nearly triple that of white people’s, was worse in multiple regions of the United States, including where I lived, than it was during the Great Recession of 2008–2009.
Sometimes when we would be hungry, when what was left was Honey Nut Cheerios we put water on to eat because there was no milk and, for a year, no working refrigerator in our home, my mother would lock herself in the bathroom and cuss that man to the heavens: Help me fucking feed our children, Alton. Our. Children. What kind of fucking man are you?
I wasn’t supposed to hear those conversations, but I sat on the floor outside the bathroom and listened anyway to the yelling, to the problems, to the growl of my empty six-year-old stomach. Being hungry is the hardest thing, and 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 and breakfast, and without them I am almost sure we wouldn’t have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.
We love each other madly, my brothers, sister and I, and we are raised to look out for each other from the very beginning. Jasmine is the baby, our baby, and we love her up as such, but Paul is the oldest, so he takes charge when Alton moves out. It’s his voice I wake up to each morning when it’s time to go to school and my mother has left already for one of her jobs. It’s Paul who gets us ready, tells us to brush our teeth and Come on, let’s go. It’s Paul who, when we have the ingredients in the house, makes grilled cheese sandwiches for us for dinner just like Mommy taught him to. It’s Paul who says, Go on now, time to go to bed, while Mommy is on her second job, whatever it is.
But it’s Monte who plays with me, lets me get away with stuff. Monte is the one with the ginormous heart. He can never not feed the stray cats and dogs that wander our streets even when our own food supplies are meager. Monte is the one who scoops up the baby birds that fall from their nests, puts them back in the right place. If I close my eyes right now I am back there with him, watching him ever so gently lift a miniature bird—I don’t recall what kind we had in our hood—and put it back into the nest, which sometimes had fallen as well.
But Monte, who is the second oldest, is, unlike Paul, also a step removed from responsibility. At night we curl up and watch TV together when I’m supposed