Some passages from The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

Some passages from The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall by Alicia Garza:


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Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves then they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.



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Recently I was in a staff retreat with my team at the Black Futures lab, an organization I started in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. We were discussing a breakdown in communication, trying to get to the root of how it happened, ostensibly so we could avoid it happening again. At a certain point in the conversation, the facilitator interrupted and said, “When I was growing up and I would get into an argument with my mother, she would say to me, ‘What happens between us is half yours and half mine.’ I want to encourage you all to take that approach here – how would the story of what happened change if you all acknowledged that what happened between you is half yours and half theirs?” I found that to be a helpful intervention…



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How do we make new mistakes and learn new lessons rather than continue to repeat the same mistakes and be disillusioned to learn that they merely reproduce the same results?



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Many of my teachers, trainers, and mentors have fallen into a pattern of making their political circles smaller and smaller rather than bigger and wider – whether that be in formal organizations or efforts that are organized but not housed in organizations. They look for people who think like them – who experience the same anxiety about having to engage in a world where not everyone thinks like you – and have adopted the idea that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building power. To be fair, we all to an extent look for our tribes, look for the places where we belong and where we can just be ourselves. But when it comes to politics, when it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford. And while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe – it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals. It’s about being able to solve real problems in people’s lives, and it’s about changing how we think about and express who we are together.



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Some are surprised to learn that movements for justice can be guilty of the same dynamics they seek to challenge. I have been to thousands of meetings, conferences, convenings, gatherings, and campaigns that failed to live, in practice, the world they claimed to want to bring into existence. Even the most radical organizations often fall short of their stated ideals. I’ve lost count of how many times organizations would state a value like “sisters at the center” and then pretend not to notice that women did the bulk of the emotional and administrative work while men did the bulk of the intellectual work. More than that, I spent ten years of my life in an organization comprising a majority of women of color, from the membership to the staff, and yet the few men in the organization watched those women do the bulk of the work of building with members, recruiting new members, organizing community meetings, setting up for and cleaning up after those meetings, navigating the difficult dynamics of coalitions and alliances, raising money for the organization, and responding to crises in the membership, while they waxed poetic with other men about what the movement needed to be doing and where it needed to go.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to as sister, queen, and the like by my peers in movements and yet been offered no vision in those organizations for how the work we did would affect my quality of life. It seemed as though I was there not as a strategist, not as a tactician, not as a group builder but instead as a means to someone else’s – usually a heterosexual man’s – improved quality of life.



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Decentralizing leadership, however, is not synonymous with having “no leaders.” Decentralization means distributing leadership throughout the organization rather than concentrating it in one place or in one person or even a few people.

Occupy Wall Street designated itself as “leaderless.” Everyone was a leader and no one was a leader. All that was required was that you show up.

The problem, however, was that simply declaring that there were no leaders didn’t mean there weren’t any. And declaring that there were no leaders didn’t address the fact that not only were there leaders but those leaders struggled to not replicate the leadership they were fighting against. Leadership was largely male, largely heterosexual, largely white, and largely educated at elite universities. If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change – we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.



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