A toughened skin and a softened heart

Alicia Garza's The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart is an engaging and wise account of organizing and movement building. These two activism currents are not the same thing; it's rare to find them both described and appreciated in one volume. It's even more rare (perhaps because these topics are usually the terrain of men?) to find them melded with "a story about [Garza's] personal journey."

There's so much to learn and savor here.

Garza is nationally known as one of the three founders/inspirers of Black Lives Matter. In the Bay community where I live, she's known as one of the most committed, diligent, and often put-upon local organizers around. She comes by her high repute because she has done the work.

Because my long time engagement has been in injecting electoral expertise into community organizing and coalitions, I read with great interest her description of how corporate developers crushed a 2008 proposition sponsored by the community organization where she worked. (I was out of San Francisco for all of this campaign, I realized to my surprise.) POWER sought to curb gentrification in San Francisco's Bayview district, the last bastion of Black community here in Techvillage. Money and developers' inside track with more established, less community-based activist players overwhelmed the POWER effort -- and POWER also found they had not put down deep enough roots in the affected community.

I thought long and hard about what we could have done differently ... 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. ... If we'd had more partnerships to draw from, we might have been able to access more of the resources we needed to win ... We came close to winning by agreeing to build with organizations that we didn't consider to be radical and some that we didn't even consider to be progressive. We brought the campaign to those we did not believe would join us, and we allowed ourselves to be surprised -- and we often were. 

Building broad support did not mean we had to water down our politics. It didn't mean we had to be less radical. It meant that being radical and having radical politics were not a litmus test for whether or not one could join our movement. It meant that we created within our campaign an opportunity for more people to be part of the fight to save what was left of Black San Francisco and to see the fight as their own. 

Organizing in the Bayview forever shifted my orientation toward politics. 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 part of a change they may not have even realized they needed. ...

We got all lucky. Garza came out of POWER several years later ready to build for Black freedom and ultimately all of our freedom -- at scale. The little localized organizations that incubate in the foundation-funded nonprofit industrial complex don't easily grow and intersect with genuine passions among unorganized people -- that is, with where most people live. Elections come closest to activating broad swathes of us, but usually organizing in that context is superficial, sacrificing deepening engagement for breadth of contact. It's good to win elections, but it takes an enduring, persistent movement to make much of those victories.

The second half of the book explores movement building out of her experience in Black Lives Matter. Garza discusses unity and solidarity, leadership, being a woman among male organizers, social media, political education and common sense, popular fronts for particular issues, united fronts which share strategy and a vision of power -- and much more. She'd be the first to say it's all a work in progress -- she's still learning.  She enunciates principles:

In a society were anti-Blackness is the fulcrum around which white supremacy functions, building multiracial organizations and movements without disrupting anti-Blackness in all its forms is about as good for a movement as a bicycle is for a fish. 

My feminism is Black, it is queer, and it includes men, masculinity, and manhood that is sustainable and does not depend on the subjugation of women to exist. Until we get there, I continue to expect men in general to sexualize me with or without my consent, will refuse to take me seriously, and take credit and be given credit for that to which they've made very little contribution. I expect them to have a propensity toward violence against me, even those men who claim to love me. And I work hard for the day when men who fight the racialized patriarchy are not the exception to the rule and, more than that, are not merely in solidarity with women. I work for the day when men understand that another masculinity is possible -- but not under the racialized patriarchy.

Her work with the Black Futures Lab has given her hope:

What we've learned through this endeavor is that the conditions for building effective and responsive social movements not only exist but are in their prime at this very moment. ... The most common response we hear from people who have been touched by our project is that they have never been asked what they want their future to look like ... We have launched a policy institute ... We've also created political vehicles that can contend for power inside the political arena. ... We don't believe in supporting leaders who are Black simply because they are Black ... we support Black leaders who have a transformative vision.... 

We do this work because we believe that Black communities deserve to be powerful in every aspect of our lives, and politics should be no exception. ... We are but a small part of the infrastructure that must be built in America to change the conditions that Black communities experience. ...

And Garza has shared a book that every progressive person in this country can learn from. What a gift!