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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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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Ultimately, policing in and of itself is problematic.
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All in all, Donald Trump appeals to people who want to be seen the way that Donald Trump sees them.
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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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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.
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I am not ready to give up this country without a fight.
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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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Protest is best used when it's part of a strategy that involves escalating tactics that build pressure on targets.
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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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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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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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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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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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We need to make sure we're creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership.
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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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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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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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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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For us, #BlackLivesMatter is really a re-humanization project. It's a way for us to love each other again, to love ourselves, and to project that love into the world so that we can transform it.
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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.