Black Lives Matter creator Alicia Garza on how you can organize — and act

PERSPECTIVE | ‘More changes are coming, and more suffering is coming’

The Lily News
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read
Alicia Garza. (KK Ottesen for The Washington Post)

Photograph and interview by KK Ottesen.

Alicia Garza, 36, has been an advocate on issues of reproductive health, rights for domestic workers, police brutality, racism and violence against trans and gender nonconforming people of color. Garza co-founded Black Lives Matter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013.

My mom has this thing where she doesn’t sugarcoat stuff. She would tell me growing up that it used to drive her crazy how we use code words to talk about things. She was like, The impacts of that are really serious. There’s no “stork,” for example. Sex makes babies, and babies are expensive. That was her regular refrain to me. So when I was in middle school and there was a debate happening in my school district over whether or not to allow school nurses to provide condoms, I had strong feelings about it. Bush — the first one — had the “global gag rule” cracking down on any public institution that had any kind of honest conversation about sex and the effects and impacts. So I got involved. I did sex-health education counseling with my peers and wrote op-eds in our local paper.

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. I woke up the next morning to see that the post had been shared and liked and all these different things. And my sister Patrisse put a hashtag in front of it, which — I didn’t even really know what hashtags were — certainly helped to put the conversation out there much farther. We then had to figure out what our next step was going to be, because there was so much response. I think people were moved in a way that inspired them to want to organize. Basically people were contacting us, saying things like: How can we be a part of this? We want to start a chapter. We want to be a part of this thing called Black Lives Matter.

I’m often surprised at how many people care and want to get involved, and they’ve just never been asked. I’ve been in conversations with family and colleagues where I say to myself, Wow, I assumed that that wouldn’t be something that you cared about. And silly me for assuming that. The best advice I ever got as an organizer was that if you can organize your family, you’re a good organizer. Because it’s not just rhetoric then. These are people who changed your diaper, people who loved on you at your 9th birthday party. And if they know that there’s something that’s really important to you, it does have the potential to change — not just minds, but the way that people act politically. So when people say, “Well, I don’t talk to my family because they’re all conservatives,” or “I don’t talk to my family because they’re racist,” I’m, like, “No, no, no; that’s exactly who you need to be talking to.” Because the only person who’s going to stop them from sending me death threats is you.

These things happening now at the federal level are literally impacting whether or not people live or die. More changes are coming, and more suffering is coming. I’m not under any illusions about that. But I am hopeful that people won’t take it lying down.

This essay originally appeared in The Washington Post Magazine.

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