BLACKLIVES

Alicia Garza, the activist whose social media message gave rise to ‘Black Lives Matter‘

The anti-racist motto was born from a post she posted on Facebook in reaction to the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. She and her friends Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi then founded the movement that gained worldwide support

Before George Floyd , before Breonna Taylor, before hundreds of other African Americans shot to death by police across the United States, there was a 17-year-old teenager named Trayvon Martin . In February 2012, a security guard named George Zimmerman killed him just because he was suspicious of him. The following year, the guard was acquitted. Amid national outrage, three women decided it was time to organize a movement to denounce this type of impunity for crimes against African Americans. They were named Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza . The organization was named Black Lives Matter : black lives matter.

The phrase in question came from a Facebook message by Alicia Garza titled “A Love Letter to Black People.” The text said: “We do not deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where black lives matter. Black people, I love you. We love each other. We matter. Our lives matter.” Her friend Patrisse Cullors synthesized the text into three words and put them together in a hashtag . Tometi then bought an Internet domain with those words. The following year, when protests arose in Ferguson (Missouri) over the death of teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, the motto exploded. Since then, the three words have grown with each episode of racial violence in the US. There is no better-known hashtag than #BlackLivesMatter. Perhaps it is equaled by the one that brings together allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, #MeToo . When outrage turned into popular revolt, as in Ferguson and Minneapolis, it was the cry of the streets. In the summer of 2020, it was the cry of an entire country.

When she wrote that message, Garza (Oakland, California, 39) was an activist working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an association defending the rights of domestic workers. She grew up as Alicia Schwartz on the outskirts of San Francisco, with an African-American mother and a Jewish stepfather who owned an antiques store, as she told The New Yorker in 2016. She was one of the few black residents of Tiburón, a wealthy suburb of north of San Francisco. Although her parents were not involved in politics, she says she became an activist at just 12 years old, when she campaigned for contraceptives in her school. She studied Anthropology and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She married Malachi Garza, a trans activist, in 2008.

After the Ferguson protests, Black Lives Matter grew into a national movement. There are already more than 40 local organizations coordinated to take the demonstrations to the streets. Garza is now director of a new organization, Black Futures Lab , which seeks to increase the political power of black Americans and develops projects such as a census of the black population in the country.

“ Black Lives Matter is so simple, but at the same time so complex…”, said Garza this summer in an interview with National Geographic , when the US was immersed in a wave of racial demonstrations of an intensity and extent never seen before. “It’s a very direct statement of a problem, but also a solution. Here we are, seven years later, and I think it’s clear that part of the discomfort with that statement is that it forces you to choose which side you’re on. You can’t say that some black lives matter, or that they matter just a little, or that they matter sometimes. The phrase asks you: do you think black lives matter? And if you think so, is this the world we live in? If not, what will we do to get there?”

Years after that Facebook message was turned into a massive hashtag , Garza is one of the best-known voices of civil rights activism in the United States. She and the movement’s other co-founders were named among Time magazine’s 100 Women of the Year , and this month Garza will publish a book of reflections titled The Purpose of Power : How to Build a Movement for the 21st Century. building a 21st century movement). His Twitter account is a barometer of the left’s reactions to Donald Trump’s absurd presidency, which has inflamed racial division in the United States.

Like almost all social leaders in the country, Garza was involved in the electoral campaign and participates in the Supermajority group, created to encourage voting among women. She uses her social media megaphone (250,000 followers on Instagram, 150,000 on Twitter) to support Joe Biden’s candidacy , although she clarifies that she comes from the world of social activism and that the Democratic candidate’s stance on racial issues seems to her to be very insufficient. This is what she said on Twitter during the presidential debate: “The Biden campaign will never win with a law and order message. This is a huge missed opportunity to denounce white supremacist violence.” At the end of the debate, however, she added: “In any case, when you vote in November, the key question on the ballot will be: civil war, yes or no?”

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EL PAÍS Pablo Ximénez de Sandoval (11 oct 2020)