The Purpose of Alicia Garza's Power
Lessons from a #BlackLivesMatter Praxis (Theory of Change Series)
Eight years ago, I was in seminary getting my first tastes of organizing and deep community development. A praxis cycle of action and reflection, woven together in spiritual community, was becoming real for me. In that whirlwind, four questions crystalized that have since given me a framework for seeking to understand and act on the world. They’ve offered a street-level educational matrix through which I could move toward the solidarity Paolo Freire was after when he described a “labor which brings into the world [a] new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.”
Those questions, which I have many times repeated, are:
1. What are things like?
2. How did they get that way?
3. What else should they be like?
4. How do we get there?
These have provided some broad guides for my life’s pursuit, and for comprehending the hidden assumptions in the philosophies and theories of change of others whether they be for good or ill.
Helpful as they have been, I recognize they are incomplete. They are detached from the soil, and detached from first commitments to discovering the knowledge and actions that could answer these questions from the subaltern peoples of the world, too lacking in content for the meta-question: what are means of answering these questions that are themselves liberatory and healing? They also leave a lot unasked inside the universe of options opened up through that last question.
As this third decade of my life and the new millennium gets further underway, I’m hungry to revisit theories of change. I’m hungry for the best emergent frameworks. How do actually do this thing in a way that makes transformative change?
Without a doubt it’s a hunger prompted by major shifts in my personal context over the past couple of years. The old money and deep, silent, violent segregationism of New England is a stark contract to the West of Colorado and California where I was formed and where places (and possibilities) always felt spacious. I’m working in the liminal space between two very distinct traditions: the cooperative and solidarity economy movement, and the community organizing school/guild developed by Saul Alinsky and Ed Chambers into the IAF. I’m reading and re-reading voraciously right now. But it is also a hunger grown from watching the world tumble, watching the latest backwash of the backlash slosh across our national political, cultural, and economic landscapes, watching communities I grew up in grow ever more recalcitrant in their harmful blindness, watching us throw fuel onto a world on fire, and wondering again, what could actually make for justice in the midst of all this?
In this milieu I’m asking: how have significant historical movements developed their analysis and what were their theories of change? What theories and practices are coming from the new generation of movement leaders and leaders building, as the Zapatistas called it, “a world where many worlds are possible?” Leaders who are significantly Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, women, and queer?
As I use this blog to work through a series of reading, learnings, and models, I want to turn today to one of our best.
Alicia Garza released The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart just months after the pandemic began, when the uprising ignited by the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Brianna Taylor was still smoldering in the streets, and the results of the presidential election were unknown. One of the three co-founders of the Black Life Matter national network and a queer Black woman who has been through it all over the past two and a half decades, she brings together the best of an organizer’s strategic rigor, the clarity that movements are not for catharsis but for building enough power to create change, the unapologetic intersectionality of her femininity, Blackness, and queerness, and the sort of empathetic relational vision lacking from many of the centered men and white movement leaders of the past.
The Purpose of Power is one of the new canonical texts we need for the hard decade ahead. It hasn’t gotten as much attention as I think it deserves, at least in the circles I run in online and in the real world. So I want to pull out a handful of Garza’s key ideas and passages, letting her words take up space, and highlight the generative ways they’ve put pressure on the questions and categories I’ve used.
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Garza wants us to recognize how the work of social change—and for her, this is centrally the work of movements (already a rebuttal of earlier organizer biases)—happens and is responsive to a multidimensional context. She writes:
“For me, movements are situated within what the elders would call time, place, and conditions. The political, physical, social, and economic environment, norms and customs, practices and habits of the time shape the content and character of the movement that pushes against them. To understand where each of us fits in a movement and what our best role is and can be, we must first situate ourselves inside a context that makes it make sense.” xii
Riffing on Frantz Fanon’s famous line that “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it,” Garza asks us,
“How do we know what our mission is, what our role is, and what achieving the mission looks like, feels like? Where do we find the courage to take up that which has been handed to us by those who themselves determined that the status quo is not sufficient? How do we transform ourselves and one another into the fighters we need to be to win and keep winning?” 3
These questions hover throughout the text, pressing us to hold them, to refuse to allow answers to be fully closed, even as we seek to be molded and mold the world into a response. Garza then offers a set of questions that closely mirror my own, with a couple important additions:
“Before we can know where we’re going—which is the first question for anything that calls itself a movement—we need to know where we are, who we are, where we came from, and what we care most about in the here and now.” 4
She recognizes more clearly than I did eight years ago that knowing our own personal story, our own ancestors, and our own traumas and defining lessons, all of this positions and sustains us in what Nelson Mandela called the long walk for freedom. Self-knowledge allows us to surface our loves, convictions, rage, wounds, dreams, and all the other complicated mix of motivations woven through the center of identity. By recognizing it, we can better accept ourselves and draw strength from the roots that move us into movements. Garza shares that it was her mother “who gave me my most enduring lesson in politics: The first step is understanding what really matters” (5). I find this is often difficult for white people. The fundamental things of life, most importantly the knowledge of our true self, become so repressed by Western culture’s facades and the shame that rushes in when we begin to face our history and responsibility to change the present that our authentic purpose (and, I would add, the authentic voice of the Spirit) is lost.
Garza recognizes that we do not enter into the work as some kind of neutral objective creature whose relationship to an oppressive social order is irrelevant. She also drives home that the points of departure we all bring to this work are not equally revelatory. “Survival and dignity were priorities,” she explains, “but to fight for them meant taking on overlapping challenges of economics, sex and gender politics, and race…For most of us, whatever we call our politics—leftist, feminist, anti-racist—dignity and survival are our core elements.” 8-9
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On those foundations, The Purpose of Power unfolds Garza’s theory of change in a circular patter that loops back repeatedly to flesh out the bones.
At the cornerstone is organizing, and she offers some marvelous definitions:
“Organizing is the process of coming together with other people who share your concerns and values to work toward change in some kind of policy, usually of the government, but also of universities, private companies, and other institutions whose policies affect and shape our lives…For me, organizing is as much about human connection and building relationships as it is about achieving a political goal.” 47
The structural, institutional, and interpersonal weave together in this paragraph even as she emphasizes the internal dimensions of this work. She recognizes that organizing offers a concrete process for claiming agency and voice which become the grounds for healing from experiences of abuse and discrimination. She legitimizes how organizing can fill the basic human “desire not to feel alone in the world.” Garza seems to agree with Freire, in her own way, that the work of coming to understand and change the world is a holistic practice of becoming human that reintegrates and breathes dignity into both the existential and the social.
If the most basic goals of liberation are dignity and survival, the most basic purpose of organizing is building the power to compel those goals into being.
“Organizing is about building relationships and using those relationships to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish on our own—but there’s more to it than that. The mission and purpose of organizing is to build power. Without power, we are unable to change conditions in our communities that hurt us. A movement is successful if it transforms the dynamics and relationships of power—from power being concentrated in the hands of the few to power being held by the many.” 56
The essential significance of power comes home for her after losing a ballot initiative campaign. Too often radicals convince ourselves that the (perceived) purity of our politics excuses us from adopting strategies that could actually realize our vision. When we fail, we find comfort in ideological righteousness instead of critically rethinking what it takes to win. She tells a story of failure—and I’m so grateful she did this—that is worth repeating here:
“My organization, POWER, had always appealed to me because of its unapologetically radical politics and vision—and yet it wasn’t our radical politics that could have won the campaign, given the deep-seated beliefs community members had about how change happened and what kind of change was possible. Winning simply required us to get as many people to our side as possible—a simple math equation in which whoever had the most votes won. I wished we’d gotten to work earlier to build as broad a coalition as possible in order to win…Building broad support did not mean we had to water down our politics…It meant that being radical and having radical politics were not a litmus test for whether or not one could join our movement…It’s where I came to understand that winning is about more than being right—it is also about how you invite others to be a part of change they may not have even realized they needed.”
Her story hits close to home. For four years, I worked with coalitions to end the criminalization of homelessness in Denver. Every year, we pushed a bill in the statehouse—designed by a radical organization that attempted (with varying degrees of success) to draw its leadership and demands from people living on the streets—called the Right to Rest. Every year, advocates would pack the House committee chambers, testifying on their traumatic experiences, the moral rightness of the legislation, and social scientific cases for its implementation. And every year it would fail. One year, after another failure at the state capitol, the lead organization behind it responded by immediately filing a similar bill to run as a ballot initiative in that year’s Denver election. It was one of the more painful campaigns I’ve been a part of. Rushed forward with ideological blinders without taking the time to bring partners along, the already too-weak-to-win coalition of partners fell apart. We had no power. Relationships were broken. And our anemic moral cry was crushed at the ballot box, leaving the movement all the more powerless now that politicians had “evidence” that their constituents were not behind the policy.
I’m a radical. And I want to win more. Because without winning, the social conditions of oppression remain in place. Winning takes power. Power, when not authoritarian or supremacist, relies on organized relationships and must be deployed effectively through strategy.
Garza presses her readers to ask: power for and by whom? Only a fusion movement that crosses racial boundaries—while committed to dismantling anti-Black structural racism—can grow powerful enough to do the job. She argues fiercely (and, perhaps, this will come as a surprise to some who mistakenly believe Black Lives Matter and the broader Black radical traditions like Black Nationalism to be “racially exclusionary”) for multiracial organizing to be kept at the center of our theories of change:
“Segregation, whether through redlining or denying citizenship, helps to create an other, which helps in turn to justify why some people have and other people don’t. It reinforces the narratives that make unequal power relationships normal. This is why it’s so important—and difficult—to engage authentically in the complicated conversation about multiracial organizing as a theory of social change. When I say ‘theory of social change,’ I mean an organizing idea that helps us answer these simple questions: What sparks change? How do we inspire our communities to fight, and how do we keep our communities fighting for the long haul? What gets in the way of fighting back, and how do we address those challenges? Without having a nuanced, authentic, and courageous conversation about multiracial organizing as a theory of change, we will leave our most critical work undone.” 86-87
A handful of tactics are called out explicitly in her book as keys to building movements of the future with the power to carry out their purpose: Direct Action, Popular Education, Intersectionality, Voting Power & Seating Electeds. She wrestles extensively with the complexities of social and traditional media, and the potential and pitfalls of platforms that have emerged in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. I hope you read the book to hear her unpack each of these.
Garza’s wisdom is her capacity to see the organizer’s vocation like James Baldwin understood the vocation of the Black writer: telling the truth no matter the cost.
“As an organizer, it was my responsibility to keep telling the truth about what was happening in our communities. There were indeed too many people living in cramped conditions, too many people not working, and too many of us keep to ourselves and worrying about our own. I would keep asking why I was seeing what I was seeing, and then I would ask myself what I could do to change it. Asking questions is one of the most important tools we as organizers have at our disposal. Asking questions is how we get to know what’s underneath and in between our experiences in communities. Knowing why something is happening can change behavior, in that it develops a practice in a person of doing the same—asking why they see what they see, what’s behind what they see, and most important, if they are motivated not to experience it anymore, what can be done about it.” 94
She is speaking truths that can lead us into the future, if we can listen.