Alicia Garza Quotes

I've been using the phrase Black Lives Matter quite a lot. I'm not saying that all lives don't matter, I'm just saying that right now black people need support and they need help because of the racism going on all around the world.

We now have the Black Lives Matter movement. I find that curious because this country is not quite the melting pot it's purported to be. Black lives are unknown in some pla'ces.

We are clear that all lives matter, but we live in a world where that's not actually happening in practice. So if we want to get to the place where all lives matter, then we have to make sure that black lives matter, too.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

When people of color and their allies say today that Black Lives Matter, the nation must hear and see it through the lens of all that has come before and understand that they speak truth.

I sometimes think they should have said 'Black Lives Matter Too,' because that is really what is being said. The outcry is that historically and presently, the feeling is that black lives don't matter as much as white lives because we don't see the same type of things happening to them.

To operate with the aspiration of color-blindness in a country whose central operating mechanism for centuries has been race belies the logic of race-neutral public policy. Public policy must account for the historic and intentional pillaging of resources experienced by black Americans.

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.

For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Black people must address itself to the causes of poverty. That's oppression in this country.

Michael Brown happened to be black. Trayvon Martin happened to be black. Eric Garner was a black man. So this pattern continues over and over.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.