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.
Some day we hope to liberate every man on earth from the tendency as old as human history to identify our strength and manhood with the ability to control the lives, limit the chances, and doom the dreams of women and girls.
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!
We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse , and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise.
We had to learn that we're beautiful. We had to relearn something forcefully taken from us. We had to learn about Black power. People have power if we unite. We learned the importance of coming together and being active
I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself.
Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.
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