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"#blacklivesmatter is a movement attempting to visiblize [sic] what it means to be black in this country. Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams," Cullors wrote in a Facebook post on July 15.
"#blacklivesmatter is a collective affirmation and embracing of the resistance and resilience of Black people. it is a reminder and a demand that our lives be cherished, respected and able to access our full dignity and determination. it is a truth that we are called to embrace if our society is to become human again. it is a rallying cry. it is a prayer. the impact of embracing and defending the value of black life in particular has the potential to lift us all. #blacklivesmatter asserts the truth of Black life that collective action builds collective power for collective transformation," Garza added the next day.
#BlackLivesMatter soon migrated from Facebook to Instagram and Tumblr. It was a platform, a hashtag, a meme, that most indefinable of phenomena: an online signifier that opened mental, emotional, and — eventually — physical space for a re-examination and reaffirmation of the value of black life in America. What began as an outraged and grief-stricken response to one particular tragedy ultimately became how the country talked to itself about race and police brutality.
That conversation is so much in the zeitgeist that in last month's first Democratic Party presidential debate, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked the candidates: "Do black lives matter or all lives matter?"
That may be shaky ground for the Democratic Party, which is also grappling with a viable candidate for the party's nomination who defines himself as a socialist and is not even a Democrat, but for Garza, achieving the imprimatur of mainstream politicians is beside the point.
The relationships, networks, and organizing work that propelled an impromptu Facebook post into a global civil rights movement for the social media era are rooted in Garza's experiences in the trenches of Bay Area community activism. Garza's #BlackLivesMatter is an explicitly leftist movement intent on achieving economic, racial, and social liberation, not just an end to wanton police brutality.
"Our people are having conversations about what a new world looks like where black lives actually matter," she says. "We're clear that we're not trying to build black capitalism; we are trying to transform society."
When she was a child, Garza remembers a teacher asking her why the skin of her palms was lighter than the rest of her skin.
"I didn't know what to say," Garza recalls. "I think I was conscious of [racism], but I didn't have language for it."
After growing up in San Rafael and attending an almost all black and brown elementary school, Garza's parents moved to Tiburon, a tiny and tony Marin County town of fewer than 9,000 residents and a median household income of $131,000, more than twice the state average. Tiburon is also one of the whitest places in the Bay Area: In the 2010 Census, Tiburon was home to just 83 African Americans.
Garza's mother and stepfather were antiques dealers. Since Garza was one of only 10 black students at her middle school, classmates assumed, incorrectly, that she lived in subsidized housing.
"That was the only place that they knew black people lived," she says.
Middle school was when Garza became an activist. In the midst of a national push for abstinence-only education, Garza advocated for real sex ed and provided peer counseling to sexually active classmates during school hours.
Although she describes her parents as "solid liberals" who aren't particularly political, she credits her mother with inspiring that foray into activism.
"My mom is somebody who wants you to have all the information. She's not necessarily going to tell you what to do, but she's big on info," she says. "In my middle school, people were having sex, and it was bewildering to me that you wouldn't talk about something that was clearly happening. It felt really important to just make it plain, so people could make good choices."
Garza continued to do work on reproductive rights at Redwood High School and at the University of San Diego, where she did advocacy work on issues like pregnancy prevention, HIV/AIDS testing, and violence against women.
Though she studied political thought in college, she didn't get engaged in leftist politics until after she graduated, when she landed an internship in 2003 with SOUL (School of Unity and Liberation), an Oakland training program for social justice organizers.
"When I trained in sociology, we would read Marx, and we would read de Tocqueville, and we would read all these economic theorists, but in a void," she says. "It never got mentioned in those classes that social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people."
Through SOUL, Garza began working with Just Cause Oakland, a new organization that, in 2002, successfully passed a ballot initiative, Measure EE, that established just cause eviction protections for Oakland tenants.
Garza's summer with SOUL wasn't just about getting a political education in a leftist "analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity," as she describes it, but a crash course in grassroots community organizing.
"It was right when [then-Oakland mayor] Jerry Brown had announced that he planned to move 10,000 new residents into Oakland in 10 years, so we were organizing low-income tenants in East and West Oakland to come up with a plan around what people wanted to see," she says. "I spent my summer getting my ass kicked, knocking on doors 10 hours a day. It was really good training. Really, really, really good training."
Garza was hired as an organizer for another East Bay community group, PUEBLO (People United for a Better Life in Oakland). Her first campaign was building community opposition to a proposed Walmart store in East Oakland. Talking to low-income black residents about the ways Walmart harms workers and the economy was a tall order. "By and large people, would say, 'Hell yeah, I want a Walmart because it's fucking cheap,'" she says.
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