Patrisse Cullors,
welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Thanks for having me back.
As-as one of the founders
of Black Lives Matter as we know it,
you are no stranger to...
just the huge amount of pushback any slogan can get.
And, so, when you... when you came out
with "defund the police,"
more recently, you have started talking more
about divesting from the police.
Is there a reason that you changed
or are starting to move away from "defund" to "divest"?
And how does that tie in to the BREATHE Act
that I believe you're working on?
Yes. I mean, for us, the defund movement,
uh, will be the ultimate slogan of this movement.
Uh, we're not going to step away from that.
But we've been talking about divesting out of the police
for a very long time,
and it's just now that it's been popularized.
It's in this moment in which people
are truly questioning the role of police.
The BREATHE Act, which is modern-day...
the modern-day civil rights legislation of our time,
is looking at how do we not just talk
about divesting or defunding from the police
but what does it look like to reinvest into our communities,
into social services,
into, um, people having access to adequate public education,
people having access to adequate health care,
people having access to adequate, healthy food?
Let's stop divesting... Let's stop investing
all of our dollars into the police
and the criminal legal system,
and let's actually invest into human care,
into dignity and to the... into life for human beings.
I have done extensive reading
on, you know, reforming the police.
I've done extensive reading on divesting from the police,
defunding the police, all these different measures
that people have-have proposed in different ways.
How do you go from a world
of police for everything
to no police or to police for only a few things
but not have that messy period in the middle
where crime just goes up?
I think there's a number of ways to do this.
Um, many of us that are part of the defund movement
or even the abolitionist movement
are not actually saying that this can happen overnight.
We know there needs to be phases.
Phase one of the plan, which is what are the first few things
we can decriminalize,
that we can make no longer illegal?
Um, I would say homelessness.
Um, I would say drug and alcohol addiction.
-Mm-hmm. -Um, and I would say mental health crisis.
So, if we start with just those three pillars
of decriminalizing them or making them fully legal,
then we could actually start
by, "Okay, what do we do with the homeless population
"since we're not gonna be investing the police
"to deal with them? Oh, we can get them housing.
-How does that work?" -Right, right.
But I would really push
that this is where elected officials come in.
Congress, Senate,
our local elected city council,
county board of supervisors
must work with the community
to build a plan to phase us out of overpolicing.
So, if I understand you correctly,
what you're saying is the term "defund the police"
is not so much "get rid of this thing right now."
It's "start building towards..." It's starting
-to build toward something. -That's exactly right.
The same way, you know,
when the president of the United States said,
"We're going to put a man on the Moon,"
he didn't say, "We're going to build a rocket,
"and then we're going to build
"a station for the rocket to launch from,
and then we're going to build..."
It was like, "This is the end goal
of what we're gonna do. Let's start the journey today."
-That's right. That's exactly right. -Okay.
Let's talk a little bit about your book.
You are a best-selling author,
and it's entitled When They Call You a Terrorist:
a Story of Black Lives Matter
and the Power to Change the World.
Your-your memoir is really touching
because you don't just talk about activism.
You talk about your life and how you got into activism.
I was really touched by how you talk about how you grew up
in a Jehovah's Witness family,
and you talk about how your mother
was kicked out of the house for being pregnant at 16.
And then you talk about how later on,
you were then shunned by your family
for coming out as queer.
Do you think that that has imbued within yourself
an affinity for all those groups of people
who are marginalized in society?
Absolutely.
I feel deeply connected to, uh, say, the underdog,
to marginalized communities
because I lived it firsthand
as a young person growing up
in a working-class, poor family,
witnessing my single mom
have to really be a single mother
and not get the support, um, not just from her family
but also not get the support from the state,
uh, from the government,
um, and witnessing my-my father and my brother
be in and out of prison.
Um, I think that really impacted me both personally,
but once I became an activist, I realized,
"Oh, this is a much bigger system,
"and I can shape that system,
"and I can be a part of a movement
that shapes that system."
Before I let you go, there's one major issue
that is going to affect the election in November,
and that is how people perceive
the protests that are taking place in the streets.
You know, Fox News and conservative media
have done a really good job of framing this
as an anarchist society where people are gonna go around
burning everything in the streets,
and that's what Black Lives Matter is about.
I've always been interested in why yourself
and your fellow cofounders of Black Lives Matter
haven't said, "You know what, I'm gonna be the leader,
"front face leader of this movement
"and speak to what Blacks Live...
Black Lives Matter would or wouldn't be doing."
Is there a reason you've shied away from this?
We didn't become the leaders
because we designated ourselves as the leaders.
We became the leaders because people said,
"Oh, these three women started this thing,
and they must be the leaders."
I do think with the protests, in particular,
we believe that people have the right, the Constitutional right,
to protest, and protest is not just here in this country.
We've seen people across the globe stand up and protest.
The Black Lives Matter organization believes
in nonviolent protest.
We also believe that people are angry and hurt
and, um, are trying to figure out when is this government
going to finally listen to us.
We also know that oftentimes what happens inside protests
are not always what they seem.
-Right, right. -It's not always Black Lives Matter
protestors burning up a building.
Sometimes and often, it's agent provocateurs.
-Mm-hmm. -And so we've been very careful
about how we talk about the protests
because we don't truly know who is doing what.
-Right... -Uh, and it's important that we stay
on message about what we want.
We want to defund the police, we want to invest
in social services, we want the Breathe Act passed,
and we want to make sure that our government
treats black people as human beings.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you for the work that you're doing.
And, uh, good luck with the rest of the journey.
Thank you so much. Appreciate you.