The Next Move: Get It Together with Alicia Garza
Season 2, Episode 1
I recently spoke with Alicia Garza about her organizing journey, where she thinks we're making progress, and where we’ve got to get it together.
Community organizing has changed in many ways over the last 15 years. Among those we should celebrate, is the shift towards contesting for the power to govern. No longer content to be on the outside with signs and great chants, the field of organizing is seeking to be on the inside too. This is a big, big deal. And the shift in orientation, it's not an easy one. For many it means governing an institution that has done harm to you and your people. This is complicated territory.
The historian and scholar, Vincent Harding once said, "I am a citizen of a country that does not yet exist." As we contest for governing power, it is for the America that will be. I believe over the next 30 years, we will become something so much closer to that America that Harding envisioned. A more loving, hopeful, equitable, and healed place. We are becoming America, the next version of ourselves. And one of the leaders in getting us there is Alicia Garza. Many people know Alicia as the first to write those words, Black Lives Matter. She is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, the founder of the Black Futures Lab, a meta-level strategist, and without question, an artist with words. But as we learned in this conversation, Alicia is first and foremost, an organizer.
Some of my favorite and inspiring takeaways from Alicia:
Her Early Organizing Days
“Every day, it was just about looking for people who were looking for us.”
Why She Chose To Write A Book About Organizing
“We don't have time to not talk about organizing what we're doing well, what we need to unlearn what we need to be doing differently, what we need to experiment with.”
On Our Opposition
“I think our opposition at this point knows us pretty well. They know how we operate, they know the triggers, they know the things that are gonna break us apart, and they exploit those things. And I think, you know, a part of our playbook needs to be, you know, what kinds of alliances and coalitions are unbreakable, right, or more or less penetrable or less predictable.”
Looking Into Differences In Unlikely Coalitions
“You know, the difference between looking into them and skipping over them is that looking into them, you have a better sense of why they exist and where they come from, and you can connect around them. Whereas skipping over them means you just do what America does, which is have amnesia, about the fact that these things exist, which means that we're in a perpetual state of like Groundhog's Day, right.”
Governing
“What does it actually mean, to run a country? How would we change it? Right? How would we change that process? Who would need to be connected? That isn't connected right now? And, frankly, how will you continue to engage with people who will be rightfully skeptical of your ability to lead? These are all big questions for organizers that we should be grappling with.”
Building Power of Black People To Improve The Whole
“These days, what drives me is thinking about how black people get to be powerful in this place that we built, and how we get to do so not at the expense of other people, but for the good of everybody and for the good of ourselves. And that I think is making me a better organizer.”
The Need To Organize Beyond The Converted
“We don’t have the luxury of dividing ourselves into smaller and smaller fiefdoms, when we're facing the biggest onslaughts of almost any generation that I can think of, we really do need each other, and we need more of each other. // We've got to reach as far and as wide as possible to have the biggest base possible to confront this tsunami that is watching over this country right now. And to basically be alive on the other side of it.”
Alicia pushes us to step up our co-governing strategy and practice. Leading something that has done harm to you is one thing, to try and fix it, another. Leading it and loving it? To me, that's next level wisdom.
Over the last 10 years we've seen the power of organizing to completely reset the context that governing happens in, and the results are pretty damn good. The stars align at the federal level only so often, and while they are far from perfect right now, they're better than they've been in decades. Seriously, I think decades. I hear Alicia calling on us to make the most of this moment, to deliver as much as possible for people who are hurting, to push for and set up even bigger wins down the road, and reflect, learn, and grow along the way.
She also reminded us that, "When you isolate yourself amongst people who agree with you about every little thing, you atrophy. And that atrophy has impacts. We have to bring together people who agree on some stuff, but they also disagree on some stuff too. And the work is to figure out how we move through our differences and make it to the other side together."
I think Alicia just teed up one of the big organizing challenges for much of the next 30 years. Getting with people who are with us on some things, but not all the things and sticking together until we can agree on more.
You can learn more about the work that Alicia is doing with the Black Futures Lab at peoplesaction.org/nextmove. You can find Alicia on Twitter @AliciaGarza, and check out her book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together, which comes out in paperback in September.
Join the conversation and listen to this great episode with Alicia Garza in its entirety here or anywhere you listen to podcasts, or click here for a copy of the full transcript!