Patrisse Khan-Cullors Quotes

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 mains

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?

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.

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.

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.

Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and there are years that answer them.

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.

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.

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.

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 Cullers

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.

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?

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.

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 f*****g 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?

Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.

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.