The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart by Alicia Garza provides an autobiographical accounting of one the founders of Black Lives Matter. The following are Excerpts from Alicia Garza’s book The Purpose of Power, with a thematic description of the text above it.

On Black Lives Matter and Movement Building

“Even though I’d been an organizer for more than ten years when Black Lives Matter began, it was the first time I’d been part of something that garnered so much attention. Being catapulted from a local organizer who worked in national coalitions to the international spotlight was unexpected.”

“I’ve been asked many times over the years what an ordinary person can do to build a movement from a hashtag. Though I know the question generally comes from an earnest place, I still cringe every time I am asked it. You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Hashtags do not start movements—people do. Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.”

“You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Only organizing sustains movements, and anyone who cannot tell you a story of the organizing that led to a movement is not an organizer and likely didn’t have much to do with the project in the first place.

Movements are the story of how we come together when we’ve come apart.”

On Activists and Influencers 

“The emergence of the activist-as-celebrity trend matters. It matters for how we understand how change happens (protest and add water), it matters for how we understand what we’re fighting for (do people become activists to create personal “influencer” platforms or because they are committed to change?), and it matters for how we build the world we want. If movements can be started from hashtags, we need to understand what’s underneath those hashtags and the platforms they appear on: corporate power that is quickly coming together to reshape government and civil society, democracy and the economy.”

On Revolutionary Theory

“FRANTZ FANON SAID THAT “EACH generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” This is the story of movements: Each generation has a mission that has been handed to it by those who came before. It is up to us to determine whether we will accept that mission and work to accomplish it, or turn away and fail to achieve it.

There are few better ways to describe our current reality. Generations of conflict at home and abroad have shaped the environment we live in now. It is up to us to decide what we will do about how our environment has been shaped and how we have been shaped along with it. How do we know what our mission is, what our role is, and what achieving the mission looks like, feels like? Where do we find the courage to take up that which has been handed to us by those who themselves determined that the status quo is not sufficient? How do we transform ourselves and one another into the fighters we need to be to win and keep winning?”

“Before we can know where we’re going—which is the first question for anything that calls itself a movement—we need to know where we are, who we are, where we came from, and what we care most about in the here and now. That’s where the potential for every movement begins.

We are all shaped by the political, social, and economic contexts of our time. ”

On Revolutionary Practice

“Our wildly varying perspectives are not just a matter of aesthetic or philosophical or technological concern. They also influence our understanding of how change happens, for whom change is needed, acceptable methods of making change, and what kind of change is possible. My time, place, and conditions powerfully shaped how I see the world and how I’ve come to think about change.”

The Interpretation of History that Shaped her Worldview

“By the time I came into the world, the revolution that many had believed was right around the corner had disintegrated. Communism was essentially defeated in the Soviet Union. The United States, and Black people within it, began a period of economic decline and stagnation—briefly interrupted by catastrophic bubbles—that Black communities have never recovered from. ”

“The gulf between the wealthy and poor and working-class communities began to widen. And a massive backlash against the accomplishments won during the 1960s and 1970s saw newly gained rights undermined and unenforced.

But just like in any period of lull, even in the quiet, the seeds of the next revolution were being sown.

Many believe that movements come out of thin air. We’re told so many stories about movements that obscure how they come to be, what they’re fighting for, and how they achieve success. As a result, some of us may think that movements fall from the sky..”

“Those stories are not only untrue, they’re also dangerous. Movements don’t come out of thin air.”

Political Ideology and Strategic Frameworks

“In the United States, “right wing” usually refers to people who are economically, socially, or politically conservative. What does it mean to be “conservative”? I’m using “conservative” to describe people who believe that hierarchy or inequality is a result of a natural social order in which competition is not only inevitable but desirable, and the resulting inequality is just and reflects the natural order. Typically, but not always, the natural order is held to have been determined and defined by God or some form of social Darwinism. ”

“One component of the successful religious-right strategy included building out an infrastructure of activist organizations that could reach even more people and influence the full range of American politics. ”

“The religious right developed the wide, more geographically distributed base of voters that the neoconservatives and the new right needed to complete their takeover of the Republican Party. These factions had many differences in approach, long-term objectives, overall vision, values, and ideology. The corporate Republicans wanted deregulation, union busting, and a robust military-industrial complex. The neoconservatives wanted to fight communism and establish global American military hegemony and American control over the world’s resources. The social conservatives wanted to roll back the gains of civil rights movements and establish a religious basis and logic for American government. And yet, even amid their differences, where they are powerful is where their interests align; they are able to work through those differences in order to achieve a common goal.”

[…] 

“Under Reaganism, personal responsibility became the watchword. If you didn’t succeed, it was because you didn’t want to succeed. If you were poor, it was because of your own choices. And if you were Black, you were exaggerating just how bad things had become.

Reagan declared a War on Drugs in America the year after I was born. His landmark legislation, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, enacted mandatory minimum sentences for drugs. This single piece of legislation was responsible for quadrupling the prison population after 1980 and changing the demographics in prisons and jails, where my mother worked as a guard, from proportionally white to disproportionately Black and Latino. ”

On Regan 

“Reagan stoked public fears about “crack babies” and “crack whores.” The Reagan administration was so successful at this manipulation that, in 1986, crack was named the Issue of the Year by Time magazine.”

“Reagan led the popular resistance to the movements fighting against racism and poverty in the Global South that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, he alluded to protest movements in the United States being used as tools of violence by the USSR, playing on widespread fears about a communist takeover of the United States and abroad. He also used fears of communism to authorize an invasion of Grenada, a then-socialist Caribbean country, to increase United States morale after a devastating defeat in Vietnam a few years prior, and to increase support for pro-U.S. interventions in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Reagan also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

“The War on Drugs had begun to morph into the War on Gangs. Economic policy shifts meant that white families moved out of the cities and into the suburbs. Television news programs and newspapers were swelling with stories of crime and poverty in the inner cities. Since there was little discussion of the policies that had created such conditions, the popular narrative of the conservative movement within both parties blamed Black communities for the conditions we were trying to survive. More and more pieces of legislation, written under the blueprint of the conservative movement but extending across political party lines, targeted Black communities with increased surveillance and enforcement, along with harsher penalties. None of these legislative accomplishments included actually fighting the problems, because this movement had created those problems in the first place.”

On San Francisco Activism

“I volunteered at an organization to end sexual violence called San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR)”

“My volunteer duties at SFWAR felt more aligned with my emerging sense of politics, but they also helped shape my understanding of my own identity: Most of the staff was queer and of color. Being in that environment helped me explore my own sexuality, as I found myself attracted to and attractive to dykes and butches and trans people. During our training as volunteers, we learned about various systems of oppression—much as I had in college—but this learning was not academic; it wasn’t detached from our own experiences. We were seeing how those systems functioned on the ground, in people’s real lives—in our lives.

SFWAR was going through a transition: It was trying to move from a one-way organization that simply provided services in response to a pressing need to one that had a two-way relationship with the people who received them—both providing services and learning from, adapting to, and integrating the recipients into the process. This shift brought with it some upheaval, internally and externally. There wasn’t a clear agreement internally about which direction to head in. Having taken on a more explicitly political stance, SFWAR was being attacked from the outside—and the work itself was hard enough without the added stress of death threats coming through our switchboard or funders threatening to withdraw.”

[…]

“My time at SFWAR was coming to a close, and one day I received a notice on a listserv I belonged to advertising a training program for developing organizers. They were looking for young people, ages eighteen to thirty, to apply to participate in an eight-week program that promised “political education trainings” and “organizing intensives.” Each person selected would be placed in a community-based organization for training, and many organizations were inclined to hire the interns if their time during the sum”

On Community Organizing

“Community organizing is often romanticized, but the actual work is about tenacity, perseverance, and commitment. It’s not the same as being a pundit, declaring your opinions and commentary about the world’s events on your social media platforms. Community organizing is the messy work of bringing people together, from different backgrounds and experiences, to change the conditions they are living in. It is the work of building relationships among people who may believe they have nothing in common so that together they can achieve a common goal. That means that as an organizer, you help different parts of the community learn about one another’s histories and embrace one another’s humanity as an incentive to fight together. An organizer challenges their own faults and deficiencies while encouraging others to challenge theirs. An organizer works well in groups and alone. Organizers are engaged in solving the ongoing puzzle of how to build enough power to change the conditions that keep people in misery.”

Working with POWER

“In 2005, I joined a small grassroots organization called People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) to help start a new organizing project focused on improving the lives of Black residents in the largest remaining Black community in San Francisco.

I’d been following POWER for a long time. It was founded in 1997 with the mission to “end poverty and oppression once and for all.” POWER was best known for its work to raise the minimum wage in San Francisco to what was, at the time, the highest in the country, and for its resistance to so-called welfare reform, which it dubbed “welfare deform.” POWER was unique among grassroots organizations in San Francisco because of its explicit focus on Black communities. That was one of the aspects that attracted me to the organization’s work. POWER was everything I was looking for in an organization at that point in my life—a place where I could learn, a place where I would be trained in the craft of organizing and in the science of politics, and a place where I didn’t have to leave my beliefs, my values, and my politics at the door each day when I went I went to work.

Joining POWER would change how I thought about organizing forever.”

“We had a robust network of volunteers who would be willing to help gather the signatures needed. We’d begun working closely with the Nation of Islam, environmental justice organizations like Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and the Sierra Club, and other faith-based organizers who would lend their support. After talking with our coalition partners, as well as the membership that POWER had built in the neighborhood, and debating the best approach, we decided to give it a shot.”

“Shortly after we qualified for the ballot measure, our coalition started hearing “may be safe to say that Black communities want to see a better world for themselves and their families, it isn’t accurate to assume that Black people believe that all Black people will make it there or deserve to. While some of us deeply understand the ways in which systems operate to determine our life chances, others believe deeply in a narrative that says we are responsible for our own suffering—because of the choices we make or the opportunities we fail to seize. Some Black people think we are our own worst enemy.

 

On Working as an Organizer 

“As organizers, our goal was to get those in the 99 percent to put the blame where it actually belonged—with the people and institutions that profited from our misery. And so, “unite to fight” is a call to bring those of us stratified and segregated by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and body, country of origin, and the like together to fight back against truly oppressive power and to resist attempts to drive wedges between us. More than a slogan, “the 99 percent” asserts that we are more similar than we are different and that unity among people affected by a predatory economy and a faulty democracy will help us to build an unstoppable social movement.

Many of the organizations that I helped to build between 2003 and today upheld the principle of “unite to fight” before “the 99 percent” was a popular phrase. This orientation is not just important for the potential of a new America; it is important for the potential of a globally interdependent world.”

On Political Strategy

“When I began working at POWER in 2005, our organization had an explicit strategy that involved building a base of African Americans and immigrant Latinos. In fact, our model of multiracial organizing was one that other organizations looked to for inspiration on how to build multiracial organizations. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, where I currently work, is a multiracial organization comprising Pacific Islanders, Black immigrants, U.S.-born Black people, South Asians and others from the Asian diaspora, immigrant Latinos, Chicanas, and working-class white people. My organizing practice and my life have been enriched by having built strong relationships with people of all races and ethnicities. I’ve had the opportunity to interrupt stereotypes and prejudices that I didn’t even know I held about other people of color, and interrupting those prejudices helps me see us all as a part of the same effort.

Capitalism and racism have mostly forced people to live in segregated spaces. If I stayed in my neighborhood for a full day, I could go the entire time without seeing a white person. Similarly, in other neighborhoods, I could go a whole day without seeing a Black person or another person of color. ”

The United States Social Forum

“In 2007, I was still working with POWER. That June, we helped organize a delegation of thirty people for a trip to the United States Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia. Half of our delegation was Black—some of whom were members of our Bayview Hunters Point Organizing Project—and the other half were immigrant Latina domestic workers.”

“I’d been a part of many national and international efforts by this time, including the last United States Social Forum, a major gathering of social justice activists that had taken place in Detroit a few years before. While those experiences had taught me a lot about how to build relationships with people with different backgrounds and agendas, that kind of work is also difficult. When you’re an outsider, it’s hard to build trust.”

“In 2007, I attended the United States Social Forum, where more than 10,000 activists and organizers converged to share strategies to interrupt the systems of power that impacted our everyday lives. It was one of my first trips with POWER, and I was eager to prove myself by playing a role in helping to coordinate our delegation of about thirty members, along with the staff. One day, the director of the organization invited me to attend a meeting with him.”

“The meeting was of a new group of Black organizers from coalitions across the country, joining to work together in service of Black people in a new and more systematic way. I was excited about the potential of what could happen if this meeting was successful. I was becoming politicized in this organization, learning more about the history of Black people’s efforts to live a dignified life, and I yearned to be part of a movement that had a specific focus on improving Black lives.

When we arrived, I looked around the room, and out of about a hundred people who were crowded together, there were only a handful of women. Literally: There were five Black women and approximately ninety-five Black men.

An older Black man called the meeting to order. I sat next to my co-worker, mesmerized and nervous. Why were there so few Black women here? I wondered. In our local organizing, most of the people who attended our meetings were Black women. The older Black man talked for about forty minutes. When he finally stopped talking, man after man spoke, long diatribes about what Black people needed to be doing, addressing our deficits  

“as a result of a sleeping people who had lost our way from who we really were. That feeling I used to get as a kid when my dad would yell to my mother or me to make him coffee began to bubble up inside me. Nervous but resolute, I raised my hand.

“So,” I began, “I appreciate what you all have had to say.” I introduced myself and the organization I was a part of, and then I continued: “I believe in the liberation you believe in, and I work every day for that. I heard you say a lot, but I didn’t hear you say anything about where women fit into this picture. Where do queer people fit in this vision you have for Black liberation?” I had just delivered my very own Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, and the room fell silent.

It was hot in there. The air hung heavy in the packed room. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Some of the men in the room refused to make eye contact with me. Had I said something wrong? In the forty minutes the older man had spent talking, and the additional forty minutes the other men took up agreeing profusely over the liberation of Black men, not one mention was made of how Black people as a whole find freedom.

 It was as if when they talked about Black men, one should automatically assume that meant all Black people. I looked at him, at first with shyness and then, increasingly, with defiance. He started to talk about how important “the sisters” were to the project of Black liberation, but by then, for me, it was too late. The point had already been made. And there my impostor syndrome kicked in again. Who did this Black girl think she was, questioning the vision and the leadership of this Black man?”

On Revolutionary Theory and Practice

“Political education is a tool for understanding the political contexts we live in. It helps individuals and groups analyze the social and economic trends, the policies and the ideologies influencing our lives—and use this information to develop strategies to change the rules and transform power.

It comes in different forms. Popular education, developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, is a form of political education where the “educator” and the “participants” engage in learning together to reflect on critical issues facing their communities and then take action to address those issues. I once participated in a workshop that used popular-education methods to explain exploitation in capitalism, and—despite two bachelor’s degrees, in anthropology and sociology—my world completely opened up. I’d taken classes that explored Marxist theory but had never learned how it came to life through Third World liberation struggles, how poor people in Brazil and South Africa and Vietnam used those theories to change their governments, change the rules, and change their conditions. Had I learned about those theories in ways that actually applied to my life, my context, my experience, I probably would have analyzed and applied them differently. Because the information had little context that interested me, I could easily dismiss it (mostly because I didn’t totally understand it) and miss an opportunity to see my world a little more clearly.”

On Education

“In this country, education has often been denied to parts of the population—for instance, Black students in the post–Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, or students today in underfinanced and abandoned public schools. Given our complicated history with education, some people involved in movements for change don’t like the idea of education or political education as a way to build a base. 

This form of anti-intellectualism—the tendency to avoid theory and study when building movements—is a response to the fact that not everyone has had an equal chance to learn. But education is still necessary.

For those of us who want to build a movement that can change our lives and the lives of the people we care about, we must ask ourselves: How can we use political education to help build the critical thinking skills and analysis of those with whom we are building a base? We cannot build a base or a movement without education.

On Gramsci, Hegemony and Cultural Marxism

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician whose work offers some important ideas about the essential role of political education. Gramsci was born in 1891 in Sardinia, Italy. He co-founded the Italian Communist Party and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. While he was in prison, Gramsci wrote Prison Notebooks, a collection of more than thirty notebooks and 3,000 pages of theory, analysis, and history.

Gramsci is best known for his theories of cultural hegemony, a fancy term for how the state and ruling class instill values that are gradually accepted as “common sense”—in other words, what we consider to be normal or the status quo. Gramsci studied how people come to consent to the status quo. According to Gramsci, there are two ways that the state can persuade its subjects to do what it wants: through force and violence, or through consent. While the state does not hesitate to use force in pursuit of its agenda, it also knows that force is not a sustainable option for getting its subjects to do its will. Instead, the state relies on consent to move its agenda, and the state manufactures consent through hegemony, or through making its values, rules, and logic the “common sense” of the masses. In that way, individuals willingly go along with the state’s program rather than having to be coerced through violence and force.

This doesn’t mean that individuals are not also coerced through violence and force, particularly when daring to transgress the hegemony of the state. American hegemony is white, male, Christian, and heterosexual. That which does not support that common sense is aggressively surveilled and policed, sometimes through the direct violence of the state but most often through cultural hegemony.”

“Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense, is mostly developed and reinforced in the cultural realm, in ways that are largely invisible but carry great power and influence. For example, the notion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is a pervasive idea reinforced throughout society. If you ever look for a toy or clothing for a newborn assigned either a male sex or male gender, you find a preponderance of blue items. If boys wear pink, they are sometimes ostracized. This binary of pink for girls and blue for boys helps maintain rigid gender roles, which in turn reinforce the power relationships between the sexes. Transgressions are not looked upon favorably, because to disrupt these rules would be to disrupt the distribution of power between the sexes. To dress a girl-identified child in blue or to dress a boy in pink causes consternation or even violence. These are powerful examples of hegemony at work—implicit rules that individuals in a society follow because they become common sense, “just the way things are” or “the way they’re supposed to be.”

Hegemony is important to understand because it informs how ideas are adopted, carried, and maintained. We can apply an understanding of hegemony to almost any social dynamic—racism, homophobia, heterosexism, sexism, ableism. We have to interrupt these toxic dynamics or they will eat away at our ability to build the kinds of movements that we need. But to interrupt these toxic dynamics requires that we figure out where the ideas come from in the first place.”

“We have to dig into the underlying ideas and make the hegemonic common sense visible to understand how we can create real unity and allyship in the women’s movement.”

“There are examples unique to this political moment. Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, hegemonic ideas have slowed our progress. One piece of hegemonic common sense is the idea that Black men are the central focus of Black Lives Matter and should be elevated at all times. The media rushed to anoint a young gay Black man as the founder of the movement, even though that was not the case. This same sort of prioritizing of Black men happened all over the country: young Black men elevated to the role of Black Lives Matter leaders, regardless of the work they’d actually put in. Why were they assigned these roles without justification? I believe it’s because hegemony in the United States assigns leadership roles to men. In Black communities in particular, leadership is assigned to Black men even when Black women are carrying the work, designing the work, developing the strategy, and executing the strategy. Symbolism can often present as substance, yet they are not the same. This is a case where an unexamined hegemonic idea caused damage and distortion.”

“They felt left out not just because of the undue influence of the corporate class and the elite but also because they perceived that the wealth, access, and power promised to them were being distributed to women, people of color, and queer people. Trump’s campaign relied on the hegemonic idea of who constituted the “real” America, who were the protagonists of this country’s story and who were the protagonists of this country’s story and who were the villains. The protagonists were disaffected white people, both men and women, and the villains were people of color, with certain communities afforded their own unique piece of the story.”

“Stripping away political correctness can also be seen in the campaign’s promised return to the way things were—a time when things were more simple and certain groups of people knew their place. These ideas are called hegemonic because they are embedded and reproduced in our culture. ”

“Culture and policy affect and influence each other, so successful social movements must engage with both. This isn’t a new idea—the right has been clear about the relationship between culture and policy for a very long time. It is one of the reasons they have invested so heavily in the realm of ideas and behavior. Right-wing campaigns have studied how to culturally frame their ideas and values as common sense.

Culture has long been lauded as an arena for social change—and yet organizers often dismiss culture as the soft work, while policy is the real work. But policy change can’t happen without changing the complex web of ideas, values, and beliefs that undergird the status quo. When I was being trained as an organizer, culture work was believed to be for people who could not handle real organizing. Nobody would say it out loud, but there was a hierarchy—with community organizing on top and cultural organizing an afterthought.”

“To be fair, some cultural work did fall into this category. After all, posters and propaganda distributed among the coalition of the already willing weren’t going to produce change as much as reinforce true believers.

When culture change happens, it is because movements have infiltrated the cultural arena and penetrated the veil beyond which every person encounters explicit and implicit messages about what is right and what is wrong, what is normal and what is abnormal, who belongs and who does not. When social movements engage in this arena, they subvert common ideas and compete with or replace them with new ideas that challenge so-called common sense.

Culture also offers an opportunity for the values and hegemony of the opposition to be exposed and interrogated. The veteran organizer and communications strategist Karlos Gauna Schmieder wrote that “we must lay claim to civil society, and fight for space in all the places where knowledge is produced and cultured.” By laying claim to civil society, we assert that there is an alternative to the white, male, Christian, heterosexual “common sense” that is the status quo—and we work to produce new knowledge that not only reflects our vision for a new society but also includes a new vision for our relationships to one another and to the planet.

It is this challenge, to lay claim to civil society and to fight for space in all of the places where knowledge is produced and cultured, that movements must take on with vigor, just as right-wing movements have tried to lay claim to those places to build their movement. Culture, in this sense, is what makes right-wing movements strong and compelling. It is what lays the groundwork for effective, sustained policy change.”

On Political Education

“Political education helps us make visible that which had been made invisible. We cannot expect to unravel common sense about how the world functions if we don’t do that work. Political education helps us unearth our commonly held assumptions about the world that keep the same power dynamics functioning the way they always have. It supports our ability to dream of other worlds and to build them. And it gives us a clearer picture of all that we are up against.”

On Political Strategy

“Building a movement means building alliances. Who we align with at any given time says a lot about what we are trying to build together and who we think is necessary to build it.

The question of alliances can be confusing. We might confuse short-term alliances with long-term ones. Or confuse whether the people we ally with on a single campaign need to be aligned with us on everything. But here’s the truth of the matter: The people we need to build alliances with are not necessarily people we will agree with on everything or even most things. And yet having a strategy, a plan to win, asks us to do things differently than we’ve done them before.”

[…]

“Popular fronts are alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs for the purpose of achieving a short-to-intermediate-term goal, while united fronts are long-term alliances based on the highest level of political alignment. The phrases are often used interchangeably but shouldn’t be.”

“A lot of activist coalitions these days take the form of popular fronts and come together around achieving a short-to-intermediate-term objective. ”

San Francisco Rising Alliance 

“We spent time together doing organizing exchanges, studying political theory and social movements, learning from one another’s organizing models, and taking action together. After about five years, this alliance grew into an even stronger one, known as San Francisco Rising—an electoral organizing vehicle designed to build and win real power for working-class San Francisco.”

On Political Strategy

“United fronts are helpful in a lot of ways, including being really clear about who is on the team. In some ways, united fronts are what we are working toward, why we organize: to build bigger and bigger teams of people aligned in strategy, vision, and values. But if I had to guess, I’d say that the next period will be characterized by a greater number of popular fronts, and I think this is a good thing.

Popular fronts help you engage with the world as it is, while united fronts offer the possibility of what could be. United fronts allow us to build new alternatives, to test new ideas together, because there is already a high level of trust, political clarity, and political unity. Popular fronts, however, teach us to be nimble, to build relationships across difference for the sake of our survival.

Popular fronts are important tools for organizers today. They match today’s reality: that those of us who want to see a country and a world predicated on justice and equality and the ability to live well and with dignity are not well represented ”

“among those who are making decisions over our lives. We are a small proportion of people who currently serve in the U.S. Congress, a small percentage of people who are mayors and governors, and a small percentage of people moving resources on your city council or board of education.

We are not the majority of the decision makers, even though we likely represent the majority in terms of what we all want for our futures. It is tempting in these times to double down on those closest to you, who already share your vision, share your values, share your politics. But to get things done, we are tasked to find places of common ground, because that is how we can attain the political power we lack.

Many people are uncomfortable with popular fronts because they are afraid that working with their opponents will dilute their own politics. I agree that popular fronts without united fronts are dangerous for this exact reason—without an anchor, without clarity about what you stand for and who you are accountable to, it can be difficult to maintain integrity and clarity when working with people who do not share your values and vision.”

On Creating Black Lives Matter 

“When Patrisse, Opal, and I created Black Lives Matter, which would later become the Black Lives Matter Global Network, each of us also brought our own understanding of platforms, pedestals, and profiles. At that point, we’d all spent ten years as organizers and advocates for social justice. Our platforms and profiles, and perhaps even pedestals, come from the relationships we have in our communities, the networks we are a part of, and the work we’ve done for migrant rights, transit justice, racial justice, economic justice, and gender justice. For nearly a year, we operated silently, using our networks and our experiences as organizers to move people to action, to connect them to resources and analysis, and to engage those who were looking for a political home. Our work was to tell a new story of who Black people are and what we care about, in order to encourage and empower our communities to fight back against state-sanctioned violence—and that meant our primary role, initially, was to create the right spaces for that work and connect people who wanted to do the work of organizing for change.

But when a well-known mainstream civil rights organization began to claim our work as their own, while distorting the politics and the values behind it, we decided to take control of our own narrative and place ourselves more prominently in our own story.”

On Political Strategy

“When I was being trained as an organizer, social media forums were not yet as popular and as widely used as they are today. Debates over strategy, outcomes, or even grievances took place in the form of “open letters,” often circulated through email. At the time, that world seemed vast and important, but in retrospect—compared to the global reach of social media—it was very, very small.

Yet even in my small corner of the world, there were those who went from being relatively unknown grassroots organizers to people with more power and influence. And I saw how the movement could be ambivalent toward its most visible members when those individuals were seen as having gone too far beyond the movement’s own small imprint.”

About the National Domestic Workers Alliance

“When Ai-jen Poo, currently the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of Caring Across Generations, built a profile and a platform based on her success leading domestic workers to win the first ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, it caused quiet rumblings within the movement that grew her. People were unsure if it was a good thing that her fame had outgrown our small corner of the world. When Van Jones remade himself from an ultra-left revolutionary into a bipartisan reformer who landed in the Obama administration as the “green jobs czar,” the movement that grew him quickly disavowed him. Even when Patrisse Cullors began to grow a platform and a profile beyond the work I’d known her for at the Bus Riders Union, a project of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, I received a call from one of her mentors questioning her ability to “lead the Black liberation movement.” In one breath, movements in development and movements in full swing can become antagonistic to those who break through barriers to enter the mainstream, where they can expose the movement’s ideas to new audiences.

Throwing Shade at DeRay Mckesson

“DeRay Mckesson is often credited with launching the Black Lives Matter movement along with the work that Patrisse, Opal, and I initiated. However, Mckesson offers a sharp lesson on pedestals, platforms, and profiles—and why we need to be careful about assigning roles that are inaccurate and untrue.

Mckesson is someone I first met in Ferguson, Missouri, a full year after Patrisse, Opal, and I launched Black Lives Matter. How we met matters. Patrisse and Darnell Moore had organized a freedom ride whereby Black organizers, healers, lawyers, teachers, “and journalists gathered from all over the country to make their way to Ferguson. I flew to St. Louis to help support another organization on the ground there. The freedom ride coincided with the time I spent in St. Louis, and as I was being given the rundown on the landscape during my first few days there, I was told about a young man named DeRay Mckesson.

Mckesson played the role of a community journalist on the ground in Ferguson. He and Johnetta Elzie had started a newsletter called This Is the Movement, and I remember Mckesson approaching me at a meeting convened by what has since become the Movement for Black Lives and asking if they could interview the three of us about Black Lives Matter. ”

“He was criticizing Black Lives Matter, which was, at that time, fending off attacks from right-wing operatives who were trying to pin on us the actions of activists who had begun to call themselves Black Lives Matter but had not been a part of the organizing efforts we were building through a network structure that had chapters. These activists had led a march where people in the crowd were chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” The news media had been stirred up like a beehive over the comments, and our team was working furiously to clarify that not everyone who identifies as Black Lives Matter is a part of the formal organization. ”

“I cannot tell you how many times I have been at events where someone will approach me to say that they know the other co-founder of Black Lives Matter, DeRay Mckesson. ”

“One could argue that it’s difficult to distinguish, particularly when there are so many people who identify with the principles and values of Black Lives Matter. But those of us who are involved in the movement know the difference—we know the difference because we work with one another. We share the same ecosystem. We know the difference between the Movement for Black Lives, and the wide range of organizations that comprise that alliance, and the larger movement for Black liberation.”

“I explained to her that while Mckesson was an activist, he was not a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

I wish that these were innocent mistakes, but they’re not. Characterizing these misstatements as misunderstandings is gaslighting of the highest degree. Mckesson was a speaker at a Forbes magazine event, “Forbes 30 under 30,” and was listed in the program as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, yet he wasn’t in a rush to correct the mistake—and certainly didn’t address the mistake in any comments he made that day. There was an outcry on social media, which forced Mckesson to contact the planners and have them change the description. But had there not been an outcry by people sick of watching the misleading dynamic, there wouldn’t have been any change.”

“Tarana Burke wrote an article about this misrepresentation in 2016 in The Root, a year before the #MeToo movement swept the country, criticizing Mckesson for allowing his role to be overstated. She cites a Vanity Fair “new establishment” leaders list on which Mckesson is No. 86 and accompanied by the following text:

Crowning achievement: Transforming a Twitter hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, into a sustained, multi-year, national movement calling for the end of police killings of African-Americans. He may have lost a bid to become Baltimore’s next mayor, but he is the leader of a movement.”

“Some will be tempted to dismiss this recounting as petty, or selfish, or perhaps more a function of ego than the unity that is needed to accomplish the goals of a movement. The problem with that view is that conflicts and contradictions are also a part of movements, and ignoring them or just pleading for everyone to get along doesn’t deal with the issues—it buries them for the sake of comfort, at the expense of the clarity that is needed to really understand our ecosystem and the wide range of practices, politics, values, and degrees of accountability inside it.

Movements must grapple with the narration of our stories—particularly when we are not the ones telling them. Movements must grapple with their own boundaries, clarifying who falls within them and who falls outside them. Movements must be able to hold conflict with clarity. 

“When in his book Mckesson credits a relatively unknown UCLA professor with the creation of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, he doesn’t do so for the purpose of clarity—he does it to unseat and deliberately discredit the roles that Patrisse, Opal, and I, along with many, many others, have played in bringing people together to take action and engaging our communities around a new theory of who Black life encompasses and why that matters for our liberation. And in many ways he does it for the purpose of attempting to justify the ways in which he inflates his own role in Black Lives Matter.”

On the Movement for Black Lives

“I met Charlene Carruthers, the first national director of the Black Youth Project 100, when I was still the executive director at POWER in San Francisco. I had no idea that the Black Youth Project would establish itself as a leading organization in the Movement for Black Lives until nearly two years after they were founded. As we were launching Black Lives Matter as a series of online platforms, the Dream Defenders, with which I was unfamiliar, and Power U, with which I was very familiar, were taking over the Florida State Capitol, demanding an end to the Stand Your Ground law. I met the director of the Dream Defenders, at that time Phillip Agnew, at a Black Alliance for Just Immigration gathering in Miami in 2014, just a few months before Ferguson erupted. I remember being in Ferguson when a young activist asked me with distrust if I’d ever heard of the Organization for Black Struggle. I had, of course, not only heard of them but sat at the feet of a well-known leader of that organization, “Mama” Jamala Rogers. Our reality is shaped by where and when we enter at any given moment.”

“We have allowed Mckesson to overstate his role, influence, and impact on the Black Lives Matter movement because he is, in many ways, more palatable than the many people who helped to kick-start this iteration of the movement. He is well branded, with his trademark blue Patagonia vest that helps you identify him in a sea of people all claiming to represent Black Lives Matter. He is not controversial in the least, rarely pushing the public to move beyond deeply and widely held beliefs about power, leadership, and impact. He is edgy enough in his willingness to document protests and through that documentation claim that he played a larger role in them than he did, and yet complaisant enough to go along to get along. He does not make power uncomfortable.”

“We have to start crediting the work of Black women and stop handing that credit to Black men. We can wax poetic about how the movement belongs to no one and still interrogate why we credit Black men like DeRay Mckesson as its founder, or the founder of the organization that Patrisse, Opal, and I created.”

“It’s ahistorical and it serves to only perpetuate the erasure of Black women’s labor, strategy, and existence.”

“I used to be a cynic. As I was developing my worldview, developing my ideas, working in communities, I used to believe that there was no saving America, and I had no desire to lead America.

Over the last decade, that cynicism has transformed into a profound hope. It’s not the kind of hope that merely believes that there is something better out there somewhere, like the great land of Oz. It is a hope that is clear-eyed, a hope that propels me. It is the hope that organizers carry, a hope that understands that what we are up against is mighty and what we are up against will not go away quietly into the night just because we will it so.

No, it is a hope that knows that we have no other choice but to fight, to try to unlock the potential of real change.”

Black Futures Lab

“These days, I spend my time building new political projects, like the Black Futures Lab, an innovation and experimentation lab that tests new ways to build, drive, and transform Black power in the United States. At the BFL, we believe that Black people can be powerful in every aspect of our lives, and politics is no exception.

I was called to launch this organization after the 2016 presidential election. After three years of building the Black Lives Matter Global Network and fifteen years of grassroots organizing in Black communities, I felt strongly that our movement to ensure popular participation, justice, and equity needed relevant institutions that could respond to a legacy of racism and disenfranchisement while also proactively engaging politics as it is in order to create the conditions to win politics as we want it to be. ”

“For the majority of 2018, the Black Futures Lab worked to mobilize the largest data project to date focused on the lives of Black people. We called it the Black Census Project and set out to talk to as many Black people as possible about what we experience in the economy, in society, and in democracy. We also asked a fundamental question that is rarely asked of Black communities: What do you want in your future?

We talked to more than 30,000 Black people across the United States: Black people from different geographies, political ideologies, sexualities, and countries of origin, and Black people who were currently incarcerated and who were once incarcerated. A comprehensive survey such as this had not been conducted in more than 154 years. We partnered with more than forty Black-led organizations across the nation and trained more than one hundred Black organizers in the art and science of community organizing. We collected responses online and offline.”

On Morning Rituals

“Every morning when I wake up, I pray. I place my head against the floor and I thank my God for allowing me to see another day. I give thanks for the blessings that I have received in life, I ask for forgiveness for all of the ways in which I am not yet the person I want to be, and I ask for the continued blessings of life so that I can work to get closer to where I want to be. And in my prayers, I ask my God to remind me that the goal is not to get ahead of anyone else but instead to live my life in such a way that I remember we must make it to the other side together.”