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Garza talks creation of Black Lives Matter movement

The Black Lives Matter movement has aimed not only to effect policy change but also to make structural racism a kitchen-table conversation, Alicia Garza, one of the original organizers of the movement, said in a lecture on Monday.

Although perhaps best known as a hashtag, Black Lives Matter began as an organizing project in part spurred by Garza’s reflections on the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American 16-year-old, and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was charged with Martin’s murder, she said.

The first thing she thought about when she heard Zimmerman was acquitted was her brother and how he could have been in a situation similar to Martin’s, she said. She found both cynical reactions to the verdict and reactions in which African-Americans were called upon to act in different ways to prevent violent situations unsatisfactory, she added.

While some have derisively referred to the use of the Black Lives Matter hashtag as “clicktivism,” the project is intended to give people platforms to share their experiences and knowledge both online and in-person where they normally wouldn’t have a medium to do so, she said.

“What we’re taught about how change happens is to call a lawyer, sue somebody, ask the President, vote, right?” she said. “There’s a transformative process that happens when people, everyday people, not just the people who speak well, not just the people who look great, but everyday people make the changes they want to see in our communities.”

The use of technology has found its “sweet spot” when it facilitates connection between people offline, she added.

Garza and her two original co-organizers — Patrice Cullors and Opal Tometi — have found themselves dealing with generational challenges, like the rollback of gains made from the civil rights movement, the Reagan-era dismantling of labor unions and the amassing of corporate power, at the same time as they attempt to learn from a broader history of civil rights organization, Garza said.

The impact of the federal government’s COINTELPRO operation in the 1950s and 1960s was not only the dismantlement of a number of civil rights organizations but also the fracture of its leadership to the point where many civil rights movement-era leaders no longer speak to each other, she said, adding this had a deleterious effect on the “political imagination” of those interested in civil rights.

The relationship between the broader movement to end structural racism and the LGBT community is complex, she said. While African-American LGBT women protesting in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson was largely well-received, the same women standing up for their own interests, including LGBT rights, has not been received as well by some people protesting structural racism, she said.

It is also important to use the construction “Black Lives Matter” instead of “All Lives Matter,” Garza said.

“All lives do matter, that’s absolutely true, and in a perfect world, that would be realized, but we don’t live in that world,” she said. “We live in a world where the average life expectancy for a black trans person is 35 years old, we live in a world where young black men don’t expect to see 21, we live in a world where black women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by the police than anyone else, so if we want to get to that world, it means we will fight like hell today for black lives to get to that point.”

However, non-black people are not irrelevant to the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.

“What we can do and have asked people to do is to use Black Lives Matter to investigate how anti-black racism affects your life, because that affects everybody,” she said.

The Black Lives Matter movement does have policy goals, including quality housing, full and fair employment and education, an end to violence against African-American people, passing the End Racial Profiling Act and having police departments collect full data on officer-involved shootings, she noted.

She said that in Oakland, Calif., her hometown, the police department used taxpayer money to purchase tanks and bazookas which ended up being displayed at protests.

However, bigger than policy, Garza said, was the need to keep engaging people and effecting change in communities.

Garza said Cullors told her that after being frustrated in engaging people after thedeath of Eric Garner,an unarmed black man who was killed by a white police officer, she continued to engage people because it was the right thing to do and was heartened to see that black women and LGBT black women had begun to lead the process of organizing and effecting change.

The lecture took place at 4:30 p.m. in Betts Auditorium. It was sponsored by the Fields Center, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the LGBT Center and the Women’s Center.

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