Words matter. These are the best Alicia Garza Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Coming out of the 2016 election, there was a few things that became really clear. One, that black people deserve to have vehicles that represent the breadth of our interests. Two, that we really need to do a better job of being able to communicate what conditions and experiences our communities are facing.
We need to make sure we’re creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership.
If you’re to look at people’s social networks, not a lot of white people have a social network that has lots of black people – it doesn’t happen. It makes sense to me that online would be as segregated as offline because it’s just mimicking patterns that exist in real life.
As you keep pulling back the layers of how deeply rooted anti-blackness and white supremacy are in this country, it is exhausting, and it is traumatizing.
There have to be consequences for police who take the law into their own hands. There has to be a shift in the use-of-force policies that are used in departments across the country.
Police violence is the tip of the iceberg when it relates to the conditions overall of black people across the globe.
I’ll be honest with you, I really struggle with the conversation around gun control.
Although police terrorism plays a specific role on behalf of the state, it is not the totality of what state violence looks like or feels like in our communities.
There is hope for humanity, but in order for us to get there, we really have to interrogate not just what it takes to change laws, but what it takes to change culture that supports laws that uplift humanity and also supports laws that serve to denigrate it.
For me, it’s clear Beyonce sees herself as a part of the movement for black lives and believes that black lives matter – and ultimately, that’s what matters.
My mom has this thing where she doesn’t sugarcoat stuff.
It’s actually OK to be unique and have your own contributions, to celebrate what it means to be black, how we’ve survived and thrived through the worst conditions possible.
We are clear that all lives matter, but we live in a world where that’s not actually happening in practice. So if we want to get to the place where all lives matter, then we have to make sure that black lives matter, too.
What we’ve seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. We don’t think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make black lives matter.
I’ll be honest with you: I think that it’s really difficult, this framing around ‘good cops’ and ‘bad cops.’ Policing, as a system, is incredibly corrupt, period.
Black Lives Matter was created as a response to state violence and anti-black racism and a call to action for those who want to fight it and build a world where black lives do, in fact, matter.
One of the beautiful things about a movement is that there are many strategies and many tactics contained within it. Not every participant in a movement is required to do exactly the same things.
I need to create an environment where I can be my best self, and that means being unapologetic about saying no to things that don’t serve me or move me closer to my purpose and the things that I care about the most.
I don’t even know what a hashtag is. You don’t turn a hashtag into a movement – people turn things into a movement.
I think that we are all deeply, deeply committed to the liberation of black people. And so, when you put people together who have and share that commitment, the sky is the limit.
How do we stop violence, looting, and riots? The way that we stop that is by making sure that people have the things that they need to thrive.
We’ve said from the very beginning Black Lives Matter is a network and also, as a broad set of individuals, is an organization moving to transform the way our society values black lives. It’s not an ‘Internet movement.’
Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, the disrespect, and the lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.
Every successful social movement in this country’s history has used disruption as a strategy to fight for social change. Whether it was the Boston Tea Party to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, no change has been won without disruptive action.
The best advice I ever got as an organizer was that if you can organize your family, you’re a good organizer.
We want to see a world where black lives matter in order for us to get to a world where all of our humanity is respected.
Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it the Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.
The police are not taking accountability for the violence that they enact in our communities, and yet there isn’t as much outrage about that as there is about some broken windows and lost property.
People think that we’re engaged with identity politics. The truth is that we’re doing what the labor movement has always done – organizing people who are at the bottom.
Certainly, we have to make sure our police forces do not have weapons of mass destruction with which they can terrorize our communities.
Growing up in a school that was majority white, my understanding of the world was that I was different but that differences shouldn’t be talked about because it’s uncomfortable.
Find an organization that you want to support and get involved. You can give money or give time.
The reason that I started the Black Futures Lab is because I have some clarity about what I think needs to happen in relationship to electoral organizing. It’s not a destination. It is a set of tools that we use to engage people that we care about, en masse, around issues that are important to us.
There is no separation between the black community and the LGBT community. As a black, queer woman myself, I often have to assert, right, that it’s not one or the other but that I am all of these things.
There has to be a readjustment of resources that is being diverted to police and policing as opposed to community health services, and there certainly has to be control over the police by the communities that they are supposed to protect and serve.
