Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us.

The Black Lives Matter means speaking out against the injustices that have been dealt to the black community and bringing about a consciousness that unseats the maliciousness with which black people have been handled.

Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.
They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.
The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.
The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.

In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.

Black Lives Matter was a piece of genus called declarative marketing. I don't know if you've ever heard of it via products in the 1970's called "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" or "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" was the name of the product. So the name of the product is called Black Lives Matter. How can you disagree with that?

'Blue Lives Matter' was always an expression of the belief that the role of police is to defend America's traditional racial order, not an actual statement about the value of human life

yes, Black Lives Matter was important. It was part of a whole wave of movements — We Charge Genocide in Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, the rebellion in Ferguson, which was separate from Black Lives Matter. I mean, it was really a kind of insurgent movement saying an end to state violence as we know it. But it was also an insurgent movement against white supremacy, though it didn’t always take the form of the Klan or the Nazis. It took the form of the police. It took the form of state policies and right-wing state legislatures passing laws that made protest a crime, you know? I mean, we saw this. When we think about the problem of white supremacy, it is the perennial problem, from before the founding of the nation. And, you know, when we think about, for example, the anti-Klan movement, the modern anti-Klan movement in the 1970s and '80s emerges where? It emerges in prisons, where prisoners are saying, “We've got wardens and guards who are Klansmen, and we need to fight them.” And it expands across the country. And I think we have to keep remembering that over and over again, because some of the same people who end up being elected to office are the — in some ways, the political offspring of the Klan and the Nazis and white supremacist organizations of the '70s, ’80s and ’90s. And then, you know, you know, because you've covered this so well, how many cases of racial violence, whether it’s against Sikhs, against Black people, against undocumented immigrants, that we’ve seen every year. Every year, you know? And we keep coming back to this question of, “Oh, well, we’ve got to deal with assault weapons.” That is important, but it doesn’t solve the problem of continuing and sanctioned white supremacist violence.

When people say "Black Lives Matter," that doesn't mean blue lives don't matter; it just means all lives matter, but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.

When we first started Black Lives Matter, I always knew that this needed to be a global movement and that we needed more people to participate. The issues of police brutality, extrajudicial killings and anti-Black racism requires everybody to pay attention. I knew from the beginning that the project was big, that the mandate was big and that, if we use new media and technology – social media, specifically – we could get the message out there to thousands, if not millions of people.

It's unfortunate that we even have to say 'Black Lives Matter', I mean, if you go through history nobody ever gave a fuck. I mean, you can kill black people in the street, nobody goes to jail, nobody goes to prison. But when I say 'Black Lives Matter' and you say 'All Lives Matter', that's like if I was to say 'Gay Lives Matter' and you say 'All Lives Matter'. If I said, 'Women's Lives Matter' and you say 'All Lives Matter', you're diluting what I'm saying. You're diluting the issue. The issue isn't about everybody. It's about black lives, at the moment But the truth of the matter is, they don't really give a fuck about anybody, if you break this shit all the way down to the low fucking dirty-ass truth.

One reason why I love defund the police is because it's a policy demand. It's actually a policy demand. One critique of Black Lives Matter from people who are sympathetic to its cause is that it didn't mean anything. Where is the policy? Where is the plan? What are you really asking for? Black Lives Matter is just a slogan. And so then, you know, six years later, in 2020, instead of saying Black Lives Matter, people started saying take away resources from the police as a very specific policy demand, well, now that's much harder to co-opt. We're hearing people say, well, this is the policy that we want. We want you to take away resources from the police, and we want you to invest it in all of the other resources that make us safe. We want better schools. We want better housing. We want health care. We want quality jobs. We want to be able to work with dignity. We want child care. We want our student debt canceled. So we want to remove resources from the carceral state and pour into all of these other avenues that make us live healthy lives full of dignity and joy.

A lot of people had sent to me over the weekend, but I thought this would be the best place to address it. There were some points in that article, or in that post, that were relevant and I could agree with. But there were also some obviously ignorant points in there. I don't think any time's a time to call out for an all-out war against police or any race of people. I thought that was an ignorant statement. But as a black man, I do understand that black lives matter. You know, I stand for that, I believe in that wholeheartedly.

Everything draws on the things that came before. The Black Panther Party drew on the civil rights movement. All of the organizations in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s—the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Liberation Front, the anti-war movement—drew on movements before them. In particular, the courage of the women in these movements is a legacy that the Movement for Black Lives draws on. I stand on their shoulders, and Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi [the founders of the Black Lives Matter national network and creators of the hashtag], stand on theirs as well. The term Black Lives Matter is new. But there isn’t anything new about what is being requested of black people, of people of color, of white people. There is work that all of us must do, and because of social media we are more aware of it. That is the impact of Black Lives Matter. I’m particularly inspired that the people leading the movement are women—LGBT women.

We say that 'Black Lives Matter’
Well truthfully they really never have.
No one ever really gave a fuck.
Just read your bullshit history books.
But honestly it ain't just black.
It's yellow, it's brown, it's red.
It's anyone who ain't got cash.
Poor whites that they call trash.