Thank you for joining us all tonight. For ideas and action with alisha garza and krista jackson. Im committee occasioned director for countrys Largest OnlineRacial Justice organization and im here to introduce. We are partnering with oneworld tonight to make a virtual space for critical conversation between editor in chief of oneworld, ms. Jackson, one of our powerful organizers and visions of alicia garza. In 2014 alicia wrote a Facebook Post that changed the world and created a movement. It read, black people, i love you. I love us. Black lives matter, that Movement Continues today. Tonight alicia will it discuss the importance of resistance and resilience and how they ground the work in a vision for collective humanity. A color change we believe everyday people are powerful enough to end the practices that are Holding Black people back and harming our country. We championed solutions that move us all forward. In the last two weeks we have held 6. 5 Million People take action for Racial Justice in our country and we are thrilled to be partnering today with oneworld for this important conversation. Without further ado here is chris jackson, oneworld editor in chief to kick us off. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight. I cannot imagine someone id rather be talking to tonight than alicia garza, our countrys most powerful and influential actress and someone who can speak particularly well to this moment but before i start i wanted to thank color of change for working with us again on this project tonight and to all the people at random house who have been so active in getting this all organized. For us to take a short moment of silence for the money tens of thousands of people who we have lost in this pandemic that we are undergoing, people who have disproportionately black, brown, brown, native, disabled, elderly and poor and also for all those that we have lost two racially motivated violence, particularly racially motivated violence in the name of the state. I will call out premiums tonight. Ahmed aubrey, Breonna Taylor and george floyd. I hope you will join me first short moment of silence to begin. And now i would like to invite to our virtual stage alicia garza. Hello. Hey. So good to see you, alicia. So good to see you and good to be seen. So, i want to start our conversation out by going back a little bit. I think of moments like this is been, for a lot of people, obviously very upsetting and jarring to us but also, i think, for people moments of awakening and i think about in my own life growing up in new york and harlem and in the 70s and 80s how my consciousness developed most rapidly around some of the most traumatic moments of that comingofage. And not only having to do with proximity to death but so many people that were murdered during that time in my neighborhood but also so only who we lost to police violence. The first time i was out in the street and protest those deaths and can you tell us about you know, obviously we worked on this book together for some time now and so i know so much about your own story but i think one of the interesting things that you have always been driven toward activism from childhood but there were a reflection point of the murder of oscar grant that drove an accelerated the commitment. Yeah, definitely. For me i came up in the Reproductive Justice Movement and got really politicized around the idea that young people, right, cannot make good decisions about what to do with our bodies. This was a time when bush number one and others were pushing this narrative in this country arou around, not only a focus on the family narrative, but very much about controlling womens bodies and for me my mother had me and she did not expect to have me alone. The thing that gave her options is that she had them. And so she use to talk to me coming up as a young kid and she would tell me sex makes babies and babies are expensive. I didnt get any of the birds and bees talk or any of that but it was when i was in college though, to be frank, that i got politicized around Racial Justice. At that time in the late 1990s, early 2000, there was a lot happening in terms of the aftermath of uprisings that had shaped our entire country. We all watched as rodney king was brutally beaten on video cameras which were not popular at that time. Of course, if you fastforward you fastforward to oscar grant in my community which was a few blocks from my home and i remember coming home after a new years celebration and turning on the television after midnight and seen that just three blocks from my house oscar grant had been shot in front of a train full of observers and it just so happen that a young person who was interning at an organization that i worked at was one of the people who caught the entire thing on camera and it became a part of the movie. There are these inflection points. Youre right, we start to understand that our lives are bigger than us but we also understand that our lives are being shaped by people other than us and we have an opportunity to decide if we think that is right and if we think that is fair and if we think that the ways our lives are being shaped lead us towards wellness and dignity, humanity and wholeness or whether the way our lives are being shaped are leading us towards punishment and criminalization and injustice. In each one of those inflection points we get to make a choice about who we are going to be. For me, at a very young age at 12 years old i decided im going to be somebody who, not only tells different stories about what young people are doing, no, teenagers are not running around having sex like crazy but there are those of us who are in intimate relationships who are trying to figure out what is best for us and we are being denied the information and the resources that we need to make decisions that work for us. We are being denied the access that we deserve to desire and pleasure and intimacy by someone who, frankly, has a whole different agenda about our bodies and our lives. We think that that is right or do we think its wrong and if we think it is wrong what are we going to do about it. For me, i got politicized and got active in the movement. For others people might shake their head and say wow, its a shame that some people dont have access to what they need and they move on with their lives but of course, we come into moments like this where you cant move on with your life. Your everyday normal is interrupted i people who have decided to take action and even in those moments you get to make a choice about who you are going to be and what youre going to contribute. Really interesting. Part of what i think is the question comes to me particularly in this moment and listening to your story and thinking about your story as ive done this for some time now and get my own life is we seem to go in these moments where there are these eruptions and visible movements and you talk about what happened with foster grant and of course black lives matter which is swarmed around a series of events going back to tremont martin and ferguson and so forth and now we are here again and are we just going in a loop or do you think each one of these things we are getting closer to something . Such a good question, chris. I could say it in writing the book are we going in a loop or are we moving forward and i will state that honestly the way i think about and look at history and look at the present and the connection between the two is that we are not going in circles per se where we end up right where we began. If anything, i would imagine it like a spiral where you are moving in a circle and coming back but you are not coming back to the place you started from and you are in a new place and you can look at where you started and assess the gap in between. No, things are not the same now that and that require us to, frankly, keep pushing forward. I know there is a lot black lives matter people were saying all lives matter and not was could you hang on one second, alicia . Can you hear me . One second pit we are having a little bit of a technical difficulty with your could you repeat that last thing you said. Sure, totally. I was just saying that in 2013, 2014 we were in terms of politics, people and we would say black lives matter and people would say all lives matter. That was the most common response. We were not seen as a legitimate, political force. We were not seen as a movement. We were seen as people who are radicals. Even in our own communities we were seen as people, for example, were trying to move a gay agenda and interrupt the black agenda. There are lots of ways in which we are in such a different place than we were then. Im sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say there is still work to be done. I dont want to paint a rosy picture here. Frankly, we are still watching the extrajudicial murders of black people on television because we capture them on a cell phone and it is only when there is an outcry that there is any semblance of political will to address it. We are going in a circular pattern and relationships to how we conceive of how we solve this problem once and for all. I do worry that just like in 2014 where we got body cameras as a result of, you know, protests that ferguson leaders lead in relationship to the murder of mike brown, maybe today will we get is better training or, you know, nicer police but fundamentally there is still a big challenge that we are facing which is, you know, what to do about the role of Law Enforcement in our communities. Is it enough to have better training . Or to restrict their practices . Or do we actually need to narrow the focus and the role of Law Enforcement in the first place . It is an important conversation for america to have right now. For some its an uncomfortable one but i can say, you know, seven years ago black lives matter made people uncomfortable and being uncomfortable is good for this country. People were uncomfortable when black people were fighting for the right to be franchised and people were uncomfortable when women were fighting for the right to be a franchise. Look where we have. Right now its not uncomfortable to believe that women should have the right to vote. It is not uncomfortable for us to believe that black people should have the right to vote. Does that mean that those rights are still under attack . Absolutely not but it means that we are in a different place because we have those rights and we are defending them as opposed to needing to create those rights and so yeah, history is not circular in that way and it is a spiral and i believe really, deeply and profoundly that we are closer than we have been before. That is an encouraging thought. You have this thing in the book read talk about, you reference it a lot, this theory about changing common sense and that is when you change the basic premise that society operates from and then you grow something new. We read today about the Minneapolis Police department or the city council in minneapolis talking about literally eliminating the police and rebuilding something in its place. It was unimaginable that a major city would be talking about that. Does that thing give you a sense of possibility of what might come . Absolutely. I woke up and saw that article in the first thing i read when i open my eyes this morning and all i keep saying to myself is what a time to be alive. The fact that the Minneapolis City Council is not only considering distributing funds so that we dont address the needs that communities have with police who arent equipped to address those needs is incredible and its a conversation that organizers and advocates have been pushing for the better part of 20 years. I can tell you what a time to be alive. I can also say i keep seeing things like the School District in minneapolis saying they are ending their contracts with unions and what that means for a decade of having police in his schools and now to state we are not going to do that is very, very powerful. Similarly in los angeles they are moving some of the same proposals and so, you know, we should remember that when we see things like this it is the result of organizing and it is the result of the pressure that protests build on people to have the political will and the courage to examine new waves of operating and that is fundamentally what movements can accomplish. We should not expect that every movement has a strategy on a blueprint that they can hand to you and you can plug into. So much of what movements do is respond to changing conditions and takes the pulse of what communities longed for but also what communities are scared of and push the envelope to get closer to what it is that we deserve so we are watching this in real time and its fundamentally incredible and we must, must, must give most credit to bad ass organizers in that city who have helped to create the conditions to make this happen and to having engaged us to work with them to help amplify it. That is just really a blessing. Thats a lot of, i think, i feel like you have to offer particularly in your book but also in your model of your life is this question that how do yof your book was how a became a movement but how is it that you can take some labor being points of terms as an idea as it was in 2014 and 20 years before that when people were working towards reform so how do you keep the pressure on . How do you build it from being just a moment to being a movement . While, there is a science and an art. You know, from the time when opal and patrice and i created the black lives Matter Network which started from a series of social media platforms and grew into a network with chapters all over the world, we did not have a roadmap. We really relied on instinct and we relied on relationships. We paid attention to what was going on in moving in the world. I hope that doesnt feel or sound amorphous but that is literally the secret sauce. Who you are in relationship to and what they are working on and what you are working on. Also, frankly, what time it is in the country. Right . And your willingness to keep pushing things forward. We tried so many things. You know, we held Conference Calls, National Conference calls for people to talk about issues that were of interest for that moment. Our first gathering, frankly, was a Conference Call that we pulled together after the killer of release of mcbride was convicted of murder. We all know that in cases of vigilante murder and also of cases of Police Murder that often times the aggressors are not held accountable and in this particular case ted was held accountable and currently sits in jail. That was a victory that was the result of organizing and im sure he will be mad at me for saying this anyway but neurotic is not only a bad ass writer but also an organizer and, you know she works with people in michigan to make sure that her brides death would not go unaccounted for and after that we held a conversation because frankly, so much of us or so many of us believe that justice comes from people going to jail. While that might make us feel better and might make us feel like they are feeling what we are feeling, the fact of the matter is, prisons and jails are terrible places to be. Prisons and jails cannot rehabilitate people and they do not bring lies back they do not address harm. We held a National Conference call at a black lives matter about whether or not ted wafer being convicted was justice and we had people on all different sides of the spectrum. They gave their feedback and input and those were the types of spaces that we really tried to create and from that, right, we started to build a reputation of creating spaces for people to connect, not only online but then moving into 2014 when mike brown was killed, patrice and darnell had a great idea to organize a freedom ride to ferguson. Another way for people to connect directly to what is happening on the ground. Not only was it intended for people to be able to connect and offer support but there was also a strategic aspect to it. Frankly, one of the things that we heard a lot was that Mainstream Media was telling their own story of what was happening in ferguson. They were telling stories of looters and riders and unrest in all the images that you would see on tv were of tanks and rubber bullets and tear gas. We organized black media to go to ferguson and to be able to tell that story from a black perspective which made a difference in terms of how the story began to be told from that point forward. I think that without getting too far into the ferguson conversation because ferguson leaders need to tell the story, im winking and nodding at you chris, thats the next book for oneworld but i will say that, you know, we left ferguson and did not think we would go back to the people who came said we want to keep organizing. They forced us to form chapters. We were like, we are not prepared for this. They were like but we are. And so you all have all run your mouth and created this umbrella so lets go. I just walked that story out to say that there is no recipe here. Its really about instinct. It is about network. It is about timing and frankly, it is about being able to move when you just know it is right. Yet, one thing that i think is so beautiful about the way we talk about movements is and that this is not to plug the book again but you do talk about thi [laughter] for you activism was fundamentally a way to connect to other people which i thought was a beautiful way to begin the story. It is not about some big abstract, Political Goals necessarily, but how to connect. And we share a vision for the world that we want to bring into being. That connection cant just happen online, although obviously we are doing a lot of connecting online right now but interesting that it is not online for the movement has an even now under the pandemic, people feel like they need to go in the streets and see each other beat with each other and marched together. What is the special sauce of connection . For connection that is what makes us human, literally. We cant live in isolation and in fact when we put people in isolation we see the focus to deteriorate. When you hear stories of people in solitary confinement, it tells you that literally they start to deteriorate because it depends on connections that survive. Its how we read the world and greeted one another. Making sense of this moment, organizing is fundamentally rooted in connection and when i was being trained as an organizer i was alwa