We need to make sure that we have an honest, honest conversation and that we engage honest practices around how racism operates in this country. It's not just about people being mean to each other.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of open and honest discussions about racism, highlighting that it involves more than just individual acts of meanness.
Alicia Garza's quote underscores the necessity of engaging in sincere conversations about racism and implementing honest practices to address it within society. She suggests that understanding racism requires a deeper examination beyond mere interpersonal conflicts, implying that systemic issues must also be acknowledged and confronted for genuine change to occur.
In practice
During a workshop on diversity and inclusion, this quote can be used to encourage participants to share their honest experiences.
Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it the Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.
What we've seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. We don't think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make black lives matter.
I think that there are real concerns that we have around whose life is important and why. So if the official story is, for example, somebody was running from the police, does their life matter?
There has to be a readjustment of resources that is being diverted to police and policing as opposed to community health services, and there certainly has to be control over the police by the communities that they are supposed to protect and serve.
Coming out of the 2016 election, there was a few things that became really clear. One, that black people deserve to have vehicles that represent the breadth of our interests. Two, that we really need to do a better job of being able to communicate what conditions and experiences our communities are facing.
As you keep pulling back the layers of how deeply rooted anti-blackness and white supremacy are in this country, it is exhausting, and it is traumatizing.
The time we are living in is the greatest opportunity to be queer, and it is almost the most dangerous time because everything is up for grabs.
Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.
From today I am no longer a racing driver. I'm retired and I am very happy.
States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.
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