Patrisse Cullors Quotes
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I don't like how cruel humans can be.
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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.
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I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody?
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Freedom means the U.S. government not being the main threat to countries around the world.
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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.
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We will not stop fighting until every single black life is provided the type of love and support we so desperately deserve.
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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.
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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.
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I think so much of my life had me growing up under extreme poverty and really challenging conditions, with having the police in my neighborhood and seeing the impact of over-incarceration. Having a father love up on me and remind of who I was, and my strength against those conditions, really shaped why I'm an organizer today.
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The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a black millennial, I remember with horrid detail how Democratic policies ravaged my community and destroyed my family.
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#BlackLivesMatter is about black pride and black power and standing up against a world that tries to annihilate us.
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I have been arrested several times protesting.
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We can feel sad, hurt, demoralized. But we can't give up.
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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.
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Black Lives Matter is one iteration of a much larger struggle to fight for black people's freedom.
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A racist and misogynist should not be a president in 21st-century America.
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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.
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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.
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We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.