The Purpose of Power

September 7, 2020
Black Lives Matter cofounder Garcia debuts with an informative and inspirational history of the movement and her own evolution as an activist. Raised by her African-American mother and Jewish stepfather, Garza was one of only 10 Black students in her Tiburon, Calif., middle school in the 1990s, where her wealthy, white peers “emulated what they believed was the stylishly nihilistic lifestyle of impoverished Black people.” She draws on her decade spent organizing in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco to share lessons on “the messy work of bringing people together,” and describes the trajectory of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter from a 2013 Facebook post decrying the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer to the group behind the 2015 Freedom Ride to Ferguson, Mo., in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing by a white police officer. Garza also details her recent efforts “to make Black people more powerful in politics” following the 2016 election, and critically assesses the elevation of “charismatic male figures” to positions of Black leadership. Drawing on feminist theory, political and economic history, and the principles of organizing, Garza makes a spirited and persuasive case for rethinking community activism in the era of social media. Progressive policy makers, activists, and voters will be galvanized.

Starred review from October 1, 2020

Garza (cocreator, Black Lives Matter) explores power dynamics in community organizing, as she believes that power enables social movements to impact conditions of people's lives. In the first half of the book, she relates her own experiences organizing social movements, while providing background on the political climate of the 1980s and 1990s in order to orient readers and to emphasize the importance of organizing work. She elaborates on the circumstances that drove her to cocreate Black Lives Matter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin the year before. In the second half of the book, Garza interrogates social movements, using her own experiences as an example. She provides a vision of successful movements, elaborates on the challenges of organizing, and explores biases and blind spots that can befall movements. She is critical of exclusionary practices and movements which equate success with social media followers. Garza ends with an explanation of Black Futures Lab, which aims to organize the Black community for political power. VERDICT An important look into community organizing that is honest about its pitfalls and promises that will engage all interested in leading and growing social movements.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2020
Garza, one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, offers a moving and impassioned account of her in-the-trenches experience as a social justice warrior. From her childhood during the repressive Reagan era to her high-school years witnessing the War on Drugs and the intersectional assault on Anita Hill, Garza quickly developed a keen awareness of how the political process and traditional civil rights organizing fails Black people. Her despair and outrage over the murders of Kenneth Harding, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown provoked her rejection of respectability politics and formation of the framework for Black Lives Matter. Garza outlines the basics of movement work, emphasizing that the key to organizing is building relationships over time, and she has plenty to say about the failures of white-led efforts with inauthentic relationships with the communities they claimed to help. While most of her examples are drawn from her work with BLM, Garza's advice is broadly relevant: build true solidarity by centering others' issues, not just your own; use an intersectional analysis that doesn't sideline LGBTQ folks or those with disablities as outsiders; and build strong, decentralized leader-ful, not leaderless organizations by distributing and sharing power. A book that could not be more timely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2020
A prominent civil rights activist offers a primer for change. For much of her life, Garza, who grew up in a wealthy White community in Northern California, has been involved in grassroots organizing in groups such as San Francisco Women Against Rape, People Organized To Win Employment Rights, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Black Lives Matter Global Network and the Black Futures Lab, both of which she co-founded. Based on experiences with a variety of constituencies and co-workers, Garza brings a cleareyed view of what is involved in creating social change--not merely hashtags that will go viral, but viable, ongoing movements that engage people "in a consistent and deep way around issues." As she notes, "the mission and purpose of organizing is to build power" and "to transform grief and despair and rage into the love that we need to push us forward." Her work has taught her countless hard lessons: that Blacks, often disillusioned with politics, have not been a huge force in progressive communities and that "not all Black people want the best for Black people" but instead "will knowingly harm Black people for their own benefit, everyone else be damned." In some organizations she has backed away from "factional power plays," internal rivalries, and the kind of "respectable" protests advocated by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. As a queer Black woman, she is especially sensitive to the exclusion of women in leadership positions: "I am used to environments where women, usually women of color, are carrying the lion's share of the work but are only a minuscule part of the visible leadership." Creating effective leadership through focused training is part of the work of organizing, she notes, and she describes Black Lives Matter, with its many chapters, as "a leader-full organization. That means that there isn't one leader but many." A pragmatic, impassioned guide to vital current affairs.

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