Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Patrisse Cullors
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Patrisse Cullors.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person - in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family's life.
In 'When They Call You a Terrorist,' I reflect on my time growing up in Van Nuys, California, surrounded by my devoted family and supportive friends, weaving our experiences into the larger picture of how predominantly marginalized neighborhoods are under constant systemic attack.
We keep calling for accountability and reinvestment and a push for all of us to imagine a world where black people are not policed but instead supported and loved and cared for. Where our families can feel safe and inspired and protected.
I think part of what we're seeing in the rise of white nationalism is their response to Black Lives Matter, is their response to an ever-increasing fight for equal rights, for civil rights, and for human rights.
A racist and misogynist should not be a president in 21st-century America.
We can feel sad, hurt, demoralized. But we can't give up.
I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.
Myself and the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, but in truth, we are loving women whose life experiences have led us to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.
I developed 'Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied' while I was an Artist in Residence at Kalamazoo College.
Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Mya Hall, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland - these names are important. They're inherently important, and the space that #BlackLivesMatter held and continues to hold helped propel the conversation around the state-sanctioned violence they experienced.
I fight to prioritize black mothers and black children because we deserve to live in a world where our healing is centered and our lives are treated with dignity, respect, and care.
Policing has never been about public safety: its origins are rooted in social control, the denial of people's human rights, securing the U.S. borders, recapturing escaped, enslaved Africans, and upholding racist, homophobic, and transphobic laws.
Many of us believed that Black Lives Matter would move this country to not only reckon with white racism but to usher in new laws and practices that would curb vigilantism and law enforcement violence. But, instead, white nationalism was nurtured and began to take root among the American people.
Freedom means the U.S. government not being the main threat to countries around the world.
Wherever black people are in America, criminalization exists. Wherever there is a white-dominant space, deep racism exists as well - no matter how progressive. If you cut too far into that progressive, if you do something that's too radical, white racism will emerge.
Our decentralized, localized leadership structure has really allowed for Black Lives Matter structures in their own communities to take on the state and take on some of the most egregious acts against black people.
The black radical agenda, which pushes us closer to freedom and the agenda to which I subscribe, calls for an eradication of white supremacy and an adoption of values and traditions endowed from the black experience.
In 2013, I helped create a black-centered political will- and movement-building project called #BlackLivesMatter.
The Trump administration has done everything in its power to uphold the harsh racist reality we have faced.
Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.
Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.
White people who voted for Trump decided to invest in a president who underwrites white supremacy in the guise of populism.
#BlackLivesMatter was born online but now lives in street actions, in conversations in our homes, and in the dignity swelling in our hearts. That is the power of the open Internet, and it is why we must do everything we can to protect black voices. Our lives depend on it.
We will not stop fighting until every single black life is provided the type of love and support we so desperately deserve.
Black Lives Matter has become what black communities all over the world have needed it to become. At times, it is a hashtag; at other moments, it is a declaration, a cry of rage, a sharing of light. It has become a movement that is international, worldwide in its scope of liberation for black and oppressed people everywhere.
The brutal history of colonialism is one in which white people literally stole land and people for their own gain and material wealth.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
Policing was developed, created, and implemented for the elite, and - in the case of the United States - the elites were and almost entirely remain white, upper middle class, cisgender straight men.
In order to reverse the maternal health crisis for black women in the U.S., we need concrete policies from our leaders and better protocols from hospitals.
Local law enforcement agencies, national police authorities, and other state-operated surveillance has created a hostile environment for communities at the margins.
Before BLM, there was a dormancy in our black freedom movement. Obviously many of us were doing work, but we've been able to reignite a whole entire new generation, not just inside the U.S. but across the globe, centering black people and centering the fight against white supremacy.
Black women's lives have never been shown any value in America.
It was white people who got Trump into office.
What we acknowledged as a nation during the one-and-a-half year trial of George Zimmerman is that the white majority's public imagination of black people was based on their fear of us, not the reality of who we are.
I think what's so powerful about Black Lives Matter is we're the first movement able to take on law enforcement and make it a popular discussion.
Since his inauguration, Trump has signed numerous executive orders that negatively impact poor, black and brown, queer, Muslim, and other communities.
I was trained within a black radical tradition that encouraged struggle within our own movements because it sharpens collective analysis - bringing us closer to the tools we need to achieve liberation.
Our communities must demand dignified housing, satisfying jobs, and proper labor conditions; our educational system must be culturally relevant, multi-lingual, and teach our histories. Our value should not be determined by legal records.
We live in a world where black people are targeted for death and destruction, and we should not be surprised when moments such as these occur - in fact, Charlottesville confirms the violence that black people endure every day.
I want to see Black Lives Matter be able to ultimately reduce law enforcement funding.
What does it look like to build a city, state, or nation invested in communities thriving rather than their death and destruction? To ask this question is the first act of an abolitionist.
Under Trump, black lives will become even more vulnerable to state violence.
I am an abolitionist. What does this mean? Abolitionist resistance and resilience draws from a legacy of black-led anti-colonial struggle in the United States and throughout the Americas, including places like Haiti, the first black republic founded on the principles of anti-colonialism and black liberation.
With abolition, it's necessary to destroy systems of oppression. But it's equally necessary to put at the forefront our conversations about creation. When we fight for justice, what exactly do we want for our communities?
My morning rituals are typical. I wake up yearning for a few extra moments of rest. I express gratitude to a higher power for the breath in my body and the blessings in my life. I shower. I dress. I eat breakfast. I exchange laughter and words with my beloveds, embracing each other as we say our daily goodbyes.
Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us.
Trump is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country - be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia.
We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work, and it's usually a particular moment in their life. For me, that moment is my brother's incarceration and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they're black.
I don't dislike my appearance at all.
Like any organizer worth their salt, I'm open to critique, but I won't be bullied or treated badly. I'm an imperfect human, and as such, I have a proclivity to make mistakes. And while I make mistakes, I am not my mistakes.
I have been arrested several times protesting.
When folks say 'identity politics' don't matter, it simply reinforces the norm of a white, middle-class, cis narrative and further marginalizes the rest of us who don't share that identity.
I don't like how cruel humans can be.
Through Black Lives Matter and social media, we've been able to have a really challenging discussion with America about police and how much it is investing in policing.
I am scared every day.
The movement for black lives isn't just about black people. Black liberation has never just been about black people. It's been about a fight for our humanity, for our dignity.
Individuals are complex and deserve to be recognized as such.
Wherever there are communities fighting for freedom and liberation, there are serious tensions.
Once upon a time, Bill Clinton was widely perceived as an ally and advocate for the needs of black people. However, it is the Clinton administration's Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act that set the stage for the massive racial injustice we struggle with in law enforcement today.
'The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman' is a reminder that people across the world are rebelling against norms and forging new paths for the most marginalized people in their own communities.
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