Alicia Garza

Everyone go read Alicia Garza's book right now, “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart.” If you have the means, buy it from a local Black-owned bookstore and support the store and Alicia. If you are unable to, then check it out from your local library. Your library doesn’t have it? Then request that they get copies.

“The same forces that deny health insurance to people with preexisting conditions, the same forces that want to deny women the right to decide when show more and if they reproduce, the same forces that want to deny protections to transgender people, the same forces that want to roll back voting rights for Black people, the same forces that want to deny each of us the light to live dignified lives are the ones that have invested a lot in making sure you don’t understand that discrimination based on race and gender and sexuality and class are all strategies to keep the powerful in power and to deny those without power from accessing it.”

“Hope is not the absence of despair—it is the ability to come back to our purpose, again and again. My purpose is to build political power for my community so that we can be powerful in every aspect of our lives. My work is to transform grief and despair and rage into the love that we need to push us forward. I am not, and we are not, defined by what we lack—we are defined by how we come together when we fall apart.” show less

Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, published a short memoir last October that positions herself in her own history and reflects on the questions she gets asked regularly around what it means to organize people, to create and support a movement, and how to make real change.

I suspect everyone who comes to this book will take away different experiences depending on what they're looking for. I'm looking to learn, and I'm starting from a place of being pretty show more ignorant of activism (I stopped being involved around the point my politics started to get complicated and I started to become cynical). Coming from that perspective, I found a bunch of reflections here that were intellectually interesting and useful to me in my preference to reduce or at least not add to the pain in the world. My main take-away (and, I think, the major theme of the book) was further reflection on the power of narrative to write and re-write history, and the importance of finding and telling the narrative that helps people see the reality that you want them to see. (I bet you can see cynicism coming through even in that characterization.) But even so, it's shared social narrative that impacts and affects the conditions of our lives -- I know this in my bones, for working environments and social environments alike -- and some narratives are inherently divisive while other are people-first and lift everyone. We've got to be conscious of the narratives and metaphors we're living, and repeat only the ones that move the world toward the world we want.

I found myself taking notes to synthesize, because there's a bunch of thoughts in this book that engender reflection, but the ideas are all expressed in a more narrative style than I tend to prefer for thinking. (Me, I like bullet points and ironclad arguments. And to be clear, some of the arguments here are cheap or rhetorically misleading -- but most are right on, and that's enough for me.)

And for fair warning, I know politically engaged Black people and committed activists who mostly found this book extremely emotionally draining, as it offers a perspective on a rather depressing tour through race in American in the last forty years. show less

A brilliant merger of the personal and political. I admire how well Garza interweaves anecdote and essays. It cuts deep because it has to.

I really loved the way Garza mixed history, politics, and theory with her own professional life as a community organizer. This is an energizing look at the way social movements can thrive (and fall apart)...I'm ready for anything else Garza publishes. Terrific on audio.

(Incidentally, I realized tomorrow is Garza's 40th birthday--happy birthday, you magnificent Capricorn!)