Alicia Garza Quotes
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Black Lives Matter started from a post that I put on Facebook after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing, just trying to process what had happened and wanting to find community around being in a lot of grief and having a lot of rage.
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The night that George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think, for black people all over the world, there was a collective feeling of incredible grief and incredible rage. And that verdict not only let George Zimmerman go home to his family, but it sent a message to black people everywhere that our lives did not matter.
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I am not ready to give up this country without a fight.
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The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. And the closer to black that you are on that spectrum, the worse off your are.
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Ultimately, policing in and of itself is problematic.
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I have to be honest: I feel like I live in a constant state of rage, and I think a lot of black people do.
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Police violence is the tip of the iceberg when it relates to the conditions overall of black people across the globe.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If I don't watch the news in a day, I think the potential for humanity is incredible. But anytime I look at the news, I'm like, 'We're in really big trouble.'
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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.
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Protest is best used when it's part of a strategy that involves escalating tactics that build pressure on targets.
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Black Trans Lives Matter, to me, is really different. I think it speaks most directly to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of trans people within the black community.
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It's hard to be a leader when you have to make hard choices and when you have to do what's right, even though people are not going to like you for it.
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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.
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We need to make sure we're creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership.
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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.
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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.
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This country was created from stolen land and stolen labor. And from a moral perspective, but also from a practical one, everybody knows that when you steal, you're always looking over your shoulder because you know that somebody may steal it back.
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Saying 'black lives matter' both literally and figuratively restores people's dignity.
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What it takes to get people from liking and sharing and retweeting to organising is a hard and long process. Technology has really changed the game in terms of how people participate and what they decide to participate in.
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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.