Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza says her organization’s movement must be about “abolishing a criminal justice system that feeds off the labor and the lives of black and brown people” and “abolishing an economic system that thrives on exploitation, poverty and misery.”
That came in a March 2015 Q&A interview with The Nation writer Mychal Denzel Smith. But before she became the face of America’s new “civil rights” political machine, Garza was co-director of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance.
When neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Garza penned a note to her Facebook page that sparked a #BlackLivesMatter movement that has since dominated national news coverage and has helped shaped the Democratic presidential primary process.
At one point in her Q&A with The Nation, Smith asked Garza “Is Black Lives Matter a movement aimed towards abolition of the police?” to which the 35-year-old replied, “I saw a piece in The Nation that said we should abolish the police, which was awesome…”
Later in the interview Garza said that she is “not sure we can have both [policing and the valuing of black lives].”
“I’m not sure that the way that we can have policing where black lives matter because the institution of policing is rooted in the legacy of catching slaves,” Garza said.
But what we can do in the interim is make sure that police departments don’t get tax dollars for tanks, for bazookas, for flash grenades and things like that. We can make sure that police departments that have been shown to exercise a pattern and a practice of discriminatory and quite frankly racist policing don’t get resources to do that.
Garza, an Oakland, California resident, announced via Twitter on Friday that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) had invited the Black Lives Matter co-founder to be her official guest at President Obama’s last State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Breitbart News has been at the forefront of exposing #BlackLivesMatter from pulling back the curtain and revealing the group funder, George Soros, to Milo Yiannopoulos’s utter evisceration of fraud and former BLM member Shaun King.
Black Lives Matter has certainly drawn its fair share of agitators and aggressors who regularly threaten violence against cops and white people.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) inviting Garza is fitting because the Congresswoman also has a history of derision and racism.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson.