Alicia Garza Quotes

Anger is not a sustainable emotion in and of itself. It has to be transformed into a deep love for the possibility of who we can be.

Solidarity can never be expressed by hearing someone's pain and then turning the conversation back to yourself.

Alicia Garza, the cofounder of the BLM organization, pushed back against that criticism in an interview. “Standing up for the rights of Black people as human beings and standing against police violence and police brutality makes you get characterized as being anti-police or it has you being characterized as cop killers, neither of which we are.… At the same time that we can grieve the senseless loss of life of five police officers, we are also grieving the senseless loss of life that occurred at the hands of police. Those things can coexist.

Change does not occur without backlash--at least any change worth having--and that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.

If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change-we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

It is fascinating to be in a nation that claims to value innovation and yet is so resistant to change.

We are fighting for a different world, and we are building new muscles to do so.

Black lives matter.

Our lives matter

I learned that racism, like most systems of oppression, isn't about bad people doing terrible things to people who are different from them but instead is a way of maintaining power for certain groups at the expense of others.

I define power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed.

Intersectionality asks us to examine the places where we are marginalized but it also demands that we examine how and why those of us who are marginalized can in turn exercise marginalization over others. It demands that we do better by one another so that we can be more powerful together.

I work hard to embody you, Mama Harriet. When I learned that after you escaped, your brothers had second thoughts and turned back, but you kept going, it gave me the strength to keep going. When I learned that you went back to bring your husband to freedom, and he refused to come with you, instead electing to stay with his new wife, it gave me the strength to always be my own compass. When I learned that you returned to bring your sister to freedom and found out that she had since died, it gave me the determination to keep going, though we may never know the outcome of what we do or whether our goals will actually be accomplished. (Alicia Garza)

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

It's important to understand that declaring that Black lives matter does not negate the significance of the lives of non-Black people, particularly non-Black people of color. But Black lives are uniquely and systematically attacked in our society. Black Lives Matter addresses its own necessity in the phrase itself: Black lives do not have value or merit in our society.

Diversity is what happens when you have representation of various groups in one place. Representation is what happens when groups that haven’t previously been included, are included. Intersectionality is what happens when we do everything through the lens of making sure that no one is left behind. More than surface-level inclusion, or merely making sure everyone is represented, intersectionality is the practice of interrogating the power dynamics and rationales of how we can be together.

When people come together to solve problems, they do not automatically become immune to the ways society and the economy are organized. We bring the things that shape us, consciously and unconsciously, everywhere we go. Unless we are intentional about interrupting what we've learned, we will perpetuate it, even as we are working hard for a better world.

There are very practical reasons why multiracial movements are vital to building the world we deserve. Segregation by race and class has been used throughout history to maintain power relationships. Segregation, whether through redlining or denying citizenship, helps to create an other, which helps in turn to justify why some people have and other people don't. It reinforces the narratives that make unequal power relationships normal.

Black women like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. They started not only a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, they started a movement

when it comes to politics, when it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford.

There are plenty of good people who do terrible things as part of their roles within systems.

La laguneta de aguas amarillosas estaba cubierta de hojarasca. Por entre ellas nadaban unas tortuguitas llamadas «galápagos», asomando la cabeza rojiza; y aquí y allí, los caimanejos, nombrados «cachirres», exhibían sobre la nata del pozo los ojos sin párpados. Garzas meditabundas, sostenidas en un pie, con picotazo repentino arrugaban la charca tristísima, cuyas evaporaciones maléficas flotaban bajo los árboles como velo mortuorio. Partiendo una rama, me incliné para barrer con ella las vegetaciones acuáticas, pero don Rafo me detuvo, rápido como el grito de Alicia. Había emergido bostezando para atraparme, una serpiente «guío», corpulenta como una viga, que a mis tiros de revólver se hundió removiendo el pantano y rebasándolo en las orillas.

In the words of Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.

HEARTBROKEN, ALICIA GARZA typed “Black Lives Matter” into the mourning nights, into the Black caskets piling up before her as people shouted all those names from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to Sandra Bland to Korryn Gaines. The deaths and accusations and denials and demonstrations and deaths

Hope is not the absence of despair—it is the ability to come back to our purpose, again and again.

Claims of anti-White racism in response to antiracism are as old as civil rights. When Congress passed the (first) Civil Rights Act of 1866, it made Black people citizens of the United States, stipulated their civil rights, and stated that state law could not “deprive a person of any of these rights on the basis of race.” President Andrew Johnson reframed this antiracist bill as a “bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” Racist Americans a century later framed supporters of affirmative action as “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination,” to quote former U.S. solicitor general Robert Bork in The Wall Street Journal in 1978. When Alicia Garza typed “Black Lives Matter” on Facebook in 2013 and when that love letter crested into a movement in 2015, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani called the movement “inherently racist.