Individuals are complex and deserve to be recognized as such.
— Patrisse Cullors
During my high-risk pregnancy, I consistently experienced subpar care from my hospital, which led me to hire two midwives instead. They provided me with excellent and loving care, and they made my pregnancy a truly special and powerful moment in my life.
The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.
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.
Presidential elections and the voter experience have long been fraught for black people. From racist poll taxes to made-up literacy tests to the egregious rollback of voting rights over the past 50 years, American democracy has, at times, felt like a weird and failed social experiment.
My first reaction to Trump being elected was a visceral one. I cried for black people in general but, more particularly, for those of us at the margins who have been struggling and who have never received enough support.
Local law enforcement agencies, national police authorities, and other state-operated surveillance has created a hostile environment for communities at the margins.
Since his inauguration, Trump has signed numerous executive orders that negatively impact poor, black and brown, queer, Muslim, and other communities.
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.
Wherever there are communities fighting for freedom and liberation, there are serious tensions.
We will not stop fighting until every single black life is provided the type of love and support we so desperately deserve.
I don't dislike my appearance at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each and every one of us has multiple identities, and this is a fact that should be celebrated. I for example, am a queer black woman who grew up poor in Los Angeles.
Black women's lives have never been shown any value in America.
The brutal history of colonialism is one in which white people literally stole land and people for their own gain and material wealth.
The Black Lives Matter National Network and the movement at large are sophisticated. We're not easily won over by talking points and campaign trail pledges. We want to see meaningful collaboration and a genuine transformation of American democracy.
Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.
White people who voted for Trump decided to invest in a president who underwrites white supremacy in the guise of populism.
The Trump administration has done everything in its power to uphold the harsh racist reality we have faced.
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.
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.
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.
I am scared every day.
I don't like how cruel humans can be.
'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.
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.
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.
In 2013, I helped create a black-centered political will- and movement-building project called #BlackLivesMatter.
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 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.
Generations of black women have anxiously watched as our children walk out into a world set against them. We teach them how to respond to police and how to react to racist comments, knowing that these lessons are not guaranteed to protect our children.
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.
Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.
A racist and misogynist should not be a president in 21st-century America.
Under Trump, black lives will become even more vulnerable to state violence.
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.
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?
Freedom means the U.S. government not being the main threat to countries around the world.
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 have been arrested several times protesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
