Alicia Garza Quotes

Alicia Garza

Profession : Activist

Birth : January 4, 1981

'Socialism' became this weird household word partially because right-wingers call Obama a socialist, which he is the farthest from.

Alicia Garza

It took me a long time to figure out that I didn't have to do everything, that it was actually a lot more helpful if I did a couple things really, really well than a whole bunch of things really badly, or nothing at all, because the whole thing was overwhelming.

Alicia Garza

We need the best and the brightest thinkers, strategists, coders, surveillance experts, tech geeks, and disruptors to utilize all of the tools we have available to us to build the world that we want to see. A world where black lives matter. A world where all lives matter.

Alicia Garza

I've learned much more about politics than I thought I ever would.

Alicia Garza

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.

Alicia Garza

Both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had guns on them, which is part of their Second Amendment right. It is a part of a culture that is largely protected by special-interest groups like the N.R.A., but the right to bear arms, it seems, only exists for white people.

Alicia Garza

Certainly, we have to make sure our police forces do not have weapons of mass destruction with which they can terrorize our communities.

Alicia Garza

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.

Alicia Garza

Protest is best used when it's part of a strategy that involves escalating tactics that build pressure on targets.

Alicia Garza

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.

Alicia Garza

We need to make sure we're creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership.

Alicia Garza

There is no separation between the black community and the LGBT community. As a black, queer woman myself, I often have to assert, right, that it's not one or the other but that I am all of these things.

Alicia Garza

We've said from the very beginning Black Lives Matter is a network and also, as a broad set of individuals, is an organization moving to transform the way our society values black lives. It's not an 'Internet movement.'

Alicia Garza

I think that there is an element where leadership is lonely, but I also believe that it doesn't have to be like that.

Alicia Garza

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.

Alicia Garza

The reason that I started the Black Futures Lab is because I have some clarity about what I think needs to happen in relationship to electoral organizing. It's not a destination. It is a set of tools that we use to engage people that we care about, en masse, around issues that are important to us.

Alicia Garza

We spend more time talking about what's happening on Twitter than we do talking about what kind of organising people are doing in the cities we live in.

Alicia Garza

Ultimately, policing in and of itself is problematic.

Alicia Garza

The demands of the Civil Rights era weren't limited to voting rights - they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.

Alicia Garza

I'll be honest with you, I really struggle with the conversation around gun control.

Alicia Garza