Duke University School of Law issued the following announcement.
I attended my first Black Lives Matter protest accidentally. I was shopping at a mall in Durham, N.C., in 2014 when a group of protesters — maybe 30 — started chanting. “Black lives matter,” they recited, as if in incantation. As they walked around in a circle, solemnly, almost prayerfully, I felt moved to join them. There is something deeply compelling about the phrase “Black lives matter.” It is a statement of resistance and affirmation.
There is also something deeply contradictory about it. It is, in the first instance, a declaration of a descriptive, self-evident truth: The sky is blue, Black lives matter, and they matter as much as White lives. Yet, the fact that one needs to utter the declaration is prima facie evidence that the statement is contestable as a truth proposition. If Black lives did matter and mattered equally, there would not be a need to say so. The statement is uttered primarily in contexts in which Black lives clearly do not matter, otherwise they would not be treated as so dispensable. Thus, the statement “Black lives matter” is also a normative proposition: In the face of evidence to the contrary, we declare that Black lives should matter. Finally, “Black lives matter” is a prescriptive utterance. It stipulates what we need to do to ensure that Black lives will continue to matter or to make sure that Black lives will matter one day. It should not be surprising that the hashtag caught on and spurred a movement.
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In “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart,” Alicia Garza offers a smart, thoughtful, introspective and unflinchingly self-reflective narrative of how she became a movement organizer and what she has learned along the way. Garza, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, is a co-creator — she does not use the word “founder” — of the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza was the first to use the hashtag #blacklivesmatter in a social media post, in July 2013, in reaction to the acquittal of George Zimmerman on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Zimmerman had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was visiting his father and was out getting candy for his brother.
Though Garza tells the story of how and why Black Lives Matter morphed from a hashtag to an organization, one of her most consistent messages is that a hashtag, no matter how viral and compelling, is not the point. “Hashtags don’t build movements. People do,” she writes. Garza is almost contemptuous of the many people who seek her advice on how to grow their brand and go viral. One of her funniest vignettes tells of the “brilliant young Black sister” who gave Garza a business card that identified her as “a student influencer.”
Garza is quite critical and ambivalent — and insightful — about social media’s use for social change. “Successful movements know how to use the tools of media and culture to communicate what they are for,” she explains, “and to help paint a picture of what an alternative world can look like, feel like, be like.” For Garza, what matters most is what takes place offline. As she explains, “I still do not believe that Twitter followers and Facebook friends represent the amount of influence you have.” Garza is interested in change, in changing the unrelenting material precarity that afflicts those on the margins of American society. She recognizes that “change requires power.” To acquire power, you need a social movement. It’s not enough to accumulate likes and retweets.
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Garza is a gifted storyteller. What makes this book sing, however, is not the stories she tells but her admirable clarity of purpose. She employs short aphorisms as thematic frames to great effect, such as “Governance is power” and “Winning is about more than being right.” The book is divided into three parts, each with six short chapters. The first part is roughly autobiographical. Garza was born in 1981 to a Black mother and a Jewish father whose relationship fizzled fairly early. She was raised by her mother, the central formative figure in her life. Her mother taught her how to be a feminist, even though she did not identify explicitly as one. When she was in the seventh grade, Garza and her family moved to Tiburon, Calif., which she describes as “a wealthy, mostly white enclave on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.”
Garza’s experience with race would resonate with every Black kid who grew up in predominantly White middle-class neighborhoods. “My Blackness was both demonized and romanticized,” she writes. “I was often the only Black person my friends knew, and I wasn’t like the Black people they saw on television. . . . I knew the things that gave me currency among white students — my straightened hair, my proximity to white wealth and privilege, the resources that allowed me to excel academically — were not always accessible to my few Black peers.” At the University of California at San Diego, Garza acquired the education and intellectual tools to articulate the complex ways in which race, gender and sexuality function across the American social and political landscape.
In the second part of the book, Garza focuses on her growth as an organizer. An eight-week internship program provided her academic and practical training, and she “learned how to engage other people in the slow process of changing the world.” Her most formative experience was her first as a professional organizer. “The First Fight,” a chapter on organizing in the Bayview-Hunters Point section of San Francisco, is almost a how-to for budding organizers. She writes that she learned early on that you cannot organize people unless you listen to them and involve them in the fight. She learned that you need as broad a coalition as possible. And sometimes you have to include people in your coalition who do not share your politics. “It didn’t mean we had to be less radical,” she writes. “It meant that being radical and having radical politics were not a litmus test for whether or not one could join our movement.”
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The third part of the book is in many respects the most intellectually stimulating. I found Garza less compelling when she expounds on theoretical concepts unmoored from her experiences; she is at her best when she uses those experiences to articulate her political philosophy and excavate the challenges and limitations of movement organizing. A salient example is Garza’s theory of Black liberation, which is at the core of her political philosophy, her animating principle. Garza wants to build a movement that places the Black experience at the center and, at the same time, makes the movement accessible to all. “Any progressive agenda that does not include the well-being and dignity of Black communities as a fundamental pillar is not really progressive at all,” she argues.
In the chapter “Platforms, Pedestals, and Profiles,” Garza argues that there is nothing wrong with movement leaders building profiles and platforms that are necessary for political power. “For me,” she declares, “the only use for a platform or a profile is in the service of the strategy of a movement.” She contends there is nothing new in this for civil rights activists, if the goal is social change. For example, she writes, “a platform in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day might have been a church congregation, whereas today a platform could be a social media page.” King and prior civil rights leaders used their profiles and platforms “to change the way of life for millions of people across the country.” Garza knows that social media makes it possible to build a profile quickly, in contrast to what was possible in King’s day. But for her, that’s a difference in degree, not in kind.
“The Purpose of Power” is an admirable, endearing and genuinely illuminating book. It reflects the lessons that a brilliant Black woman distilled over 20 years in her quest to make the world around her a better place. Garza projects idealism, pragmatism and realism. One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, historians will write about one of the more important social movements of the 21st century. And when they do, they will write about Alicia Garza. They will write that she believed in resistance and power and in making sure that Black lives, and therefore all lives, matter.
Original source can be found here.
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