Alicia Garza

The three words came from a Facebook post in July 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted: Alicia Garza wrote a note ending in a phrase Patrisse Cullors turned into a hashtag, and Opal Tometi built the platforms around it. The Purpose of Power, published by Doubleday in 2020, is not that story retold. It is a book about organising, written against the assumption that a hashtag is a movement, and its argument is that visibility is the easy part and durable structure the hard one, so it spends its length on coalitions, on the boredom of institution-building, and on why leaderless is not the same as leaderful. Garza is a labour organiser by trade, co-founded the Black Futures Lab and directs it, and has worked on domestic worker rights. Critics on the left have accused the network she helped start of exactly the structural weaknesses she writes about.