July 09, 2016

Conversation With Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza on 3rd Anniversary of Movement

"According to Garza, “Race, policing and the multiple ways in which state-sanctioned violence impacts our communities has become an issue that is front and center,” and BLM’s main success has been in achieving a “cultural shift that is moving through this country,” one that is “necessary for real policy change to happen.”

Conversation With Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza on 3rd Anniversary of Movement 

By Sonali Kolhatkar, www.truthdig.com and from Rising Up With Sonali on Vimeo.
July 8th, 2016, posted by popular resistance.org

Read this excellent article and see the 21 minute conversation between Alicia Garza and superb interviewer Sonali Kolhtkar here

Excerpt:
..."Transformation is what Garza, Cullors and Tometi are demanding of American society, for this country has never cared for black lives. To expect a system of policing (and all the institutions of power that police protect) to undergo a few tweaks in order to accommodate full equality for African-Americans is asking too much. “It’s really important that we understand transformation, one, [that it happens] on a much longer trajectory,” said Garza, “two, in terms of the interrelationship between cultural change and policy change; and three, as a reimagining of alternatives that get put into place for systems that we are trying to dismantle.”

In other words, the cultural shift that is reflected by black celebrities and others is just the first step. Convictions of police officers who killed unarmed people “are a step, but they are not the step to reforming, and transforming how policing is operating in our communities,” Garza insists. She says real transformation can only happen when police departments get the “clear message that it is unacceptable to be killing people in the course of ‘keeping people safe.’ ”

BLM’s focus is not restricted to problems of policing. Police violence is the most dramatic representation of state violence against black communities, but there are myriad other connected issues. Oakland, where Garza is based, is a historically black city and has a rich and storied background of militant black activism, especially as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. But in recent years Silicon Valley’s tech industry workers have left expensive San Francisco looking for cheaper rents and turned Oakland into the site of a war over gentrification. Garza sees the problems of policing, gentrification, poverty and unemployment as intimately linked. “You can’t separate police violence from gentrification because police violence and policing is often used to bolster those processes,” said Garza, who has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area on this issue for more than a decade." ....

read article with link to interview