Tarana Burke: How Can We Build A World Where People Don't Have To Say "Me Too"? & Me Too is a movement, not a moment | Tarana Burke TED TALK 1FEB19 & 30NOV18

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Tarana Burke: How Can We Build A World Where People Don't Have To Say "Me Too"?

RESUME LISTENING

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, ideas about Gender, Power and Fairness. And just a quick warning - there are stories in this episode about sexual violence and harassment that may be difficult to hear.

Hi, Tarana.

TARANA BURKE: Hi. How are you?

RAZ: Hi, it's Guy Raz here. How are you?

BURKE: Good.

RAZ: Thank you for coming in.

BURKE: Thank you. I'm sorry for being late.

My name is Tarana Burke, and I'm the founder of the #MeToo movement. So it came to me in parts, and it started - the idea of wanting to address and deal with sexual violence certainly came to me before the words me too were the tool that I was using to do it. So you know, I'm a survivor of sexual violence and had been grappling with my own journey around healing, had been grappling with what that looks like and just - and how it was affecting me and just coming to terms with that. And it was just painfully clear to me at some point that we didn't have any conversation about sexual violence, and I saw so much.

I had had a moment in my life where I met a child in my early 20s who was in my camp, who was - I used to run a youth leadership program - and basically confided in me that she had been molested by her stepfather. But she did so at a time when I really did not know what to do with that information. And the only thing that came to me to say was that this happened to me, too. You know, like this thing that - it just didn't feel like the appropriate thing to say at the time, but that's what was, like, ringing in my head while she was saying it. Like, it was a moment of me confronting my own issues as well.

But - so the words me too came from that moment because it was - after it happened and she, like, walked away and the moment was over, I realized I wish I had said that to her because I wish somebody would've said it to me. You know, I wish I didn't go through my formative years thinking I was the only person in the world - me and Maya Angelou were the only two people in the world that this had happened to, which is what I thought for a while.

I often think about the numbers of adult decisions I made between 6 and, like, 12, all related to going through and experiencing sexual violence. If there was somebody who would've said, listen, I don't know what's going on, but this thing happened to me. And if you are experiencing it, you're not alone. You're not nasty. You're not bad, and it's not your fault. If there was somebody who would've just interjected that, I think it would've changed the trajectory of my life.

RAZ: So this - I mean, this idea of #MeToo really began as a way to recognize and to sort of say, you're not alone. And that is really how it began. And about 10 years after you created this idea, it exploded into the consciousness of the world with reporting and social media and - what do you remember about how that began?

BURKE: Well, even before that, I want to just say - before #MeToo exploded into the world in 2017, it started as this idea of making sure that survivors knew they weren't alone, but it quickly evolved into also knowing that we have to do the work of ending sexual violence collectively. And so more than just a declarative statement, it was about survivors coming together to organize and do the work of healing ourselves and our community.

So when 2017 happened and it exploded, it was - you know, I was initially very worried that that sentiment would be lost. You know, we live in a viral age. And I've clearly seen numerous other hashtags go viral. And I've seen them come and go. And then I've also seen black women and people of color at the center of those things be removed or be replaced or be erased in one way or another.

And so all of those were concerns in probably the first few hours. But it was necessary because there's not a scenario that I can think of that I could've generated myself to bring the work of ending sexual violence into the public consciousness in the way that it has.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The #MeToo campaign is giving a voice to many women who say they've experienced sexual harassment and abuse.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Prompting the #MeToo campaign.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: #MeToo movement.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: #MeToo.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: #MeToo mobilizing women seeking office.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: Also known as the ME TOO Congress Act.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: A guy behind me pretending to perform a sex act on me with all the other guys watching and all the other guys laughing.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I didn't tell anyone, afraid that I wouldn't be believed.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG: Every woman in my vintage...

CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD: I am here today not because I want to be.

GINSBURG: ...Has not just one story...

FORD: I am here because I believe it is my civic duty.

GINSBURG: ...But many stories.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I said it's because time's up. Is that right?

(CHEERING)

RAZ: The #MeToo movement has changed how we think and talk about Gender, Power and Fairness. Behaviors that were once downplayed or even ignored in the workplace, in social settings, even at home are now part of a dialogue that's moved beyond just a hashtag. There's now a conversation between women and men that's effecting real change. So today on the show, we're going to explore how this movement moved the world, defined an era of reckoning and what it will take to move it forward.

And for Tarana Burke, the way ahead will be necessary, but not easy, because for every step forward, some days, it feels like there are giant leaps back. Here's more from Tarana Burke on the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

BURKE: I've been trying to figure out what I was going to say here for months. And so I searched and searched for days on end, trying to find the right configuration of words. And although intellectually, I could bullet point the big ideas that I wanted to share about #MeToo and this movement that I founded, I kept finding myself falling short of finding the heart.

I wanted to pour myself into this moment and tell you why even the possibility of healing or interrupting sexual violence was worth standing and fighting for. I wanted to rally you to your feet with an uplifting speech about the important work of fighting for the dignity and humanity of survivors. But I don't know if I have it.

The reality is, after soldiering through the Supreme Court nomination process and attacks from the White House, gross mischaracterizations, Internet trolls and marches and heart-wrenching testimonies, I'm faced with my own hard truth. I'm numb.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Yeah. I mean, it must, at times, feel discouraging.

BURKE: You know, it's some mixture of disappointment, frustration and sadness. But I feel sad sometimes that so many of us lack the ability to empathize with people to try to understand. Like, one of the things that became painfully clear for me around the Kavanaugh hearings with Dr. Ford testifying was just how little people understand what survival looks like. We have sort of a "Law & Order: SVU" idea of what that looks like.

And so when I heard the backlash that she got, a lot of the, like, well, how could she forget this? And it was - a lot of it came from other survivors, right? There were people who wrote on our pages, like, I was assaulted when I was 6, and I remember every single moment of it, and she's lying because how could she not - forget this and that?

And I thought, you know, we don't have enough conversation, or even examples in pop culture, of what the act of surviving looks like. And it doesn't look the same for everybody. So like, I identify with her because as a survivor of sexual violence, one of the ways that we survive is by practicing forgetting, right? Like, I actually have a bad memory because I've spent most of my life trying not to remember.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: You know, most social movements start out ahead of where the culture and the society is. It's - that's why they start - right? - because they start a conversation. There's a backlash. And then down the road, we sort of reflect on it and say, yeah, that was really important. But do you - when you look ahead, you know, do you imagine this conversation leading to a better place in our lifetimes, in a short period of time?

BURKE: I think of this in long term and short term. So there's - in the short term, I am very clear that this moment has started changing people's lives individually because I've heard over and over again this last year, people coming to me saying, I thought I would go to my grave with this, but I was able to tell my mom, and my mom told me her story. I told my dad, and my dad told me his story.

But beyond that, I also think that people are ready for action. And so in the long term, you know, we can't go back. There's - Iyanla Vanzant, a self-help personality, has a book called "Faith In The Valley." And there's a quote in that book about when a light goes on and shows you something, you can't unsee it. So I don't think we ever go back from here. I think we continue to move forward.

And when we get distracted by naming lists of predators, like, you know, these articles that come out and say, here's the 200 or 400 men who have fallen since #MeToo, those things are distractions. People need to be called out for their behavior. But beyond that, their behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in the context of a society that creates space for that kind of behavior.

There's a little boy right now being socialized to disrespect women, to not respect somebody's bodily autonomy, to think that he's better because he's a male. So we can fire Bob from - in accounting, and we can take so-and-so off the board, but if little Timmy and little Jamal are not learning - unlearning what we know now, then we're just going to create a replacement for them.

So I think that the work that we're looking at moving forward is, one, helping people figure out where they fit in this puzzle. But also, there's going to be a unrelenting core group of people who are just absolutely focused on getting us to a world where people don't have to say me too.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: That's Tarana Burke. She's the founder of the #MeToo movement. You can see Tarana's full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas around Gender, Power and Fairness. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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Me Too is a movement, not a moment | Tarana Burke

TED

Published on Jan 4, 2019

In 2006, Tarana Burke was consumed by a desire to do something about the sexual violence she saw in her community. She took out a piece of paper, wrote "Me Too" across the top and laid out an action plan for a movement centered on the power of empathy between survivors. More than a decade later, she reflects on what has since become a global movement -- and makes a powerful call to dismantle the power and privilege that are building blocks of sexual violence. "We owe future generations nothing less than a world free of sexual violence," she says. "I believe we can build that world."

TRANSCRIPT

I've been trying to figure out what I was going to say here for months. Because there's no bigger stage than TED, it felt like getting my message right in this moment was more important than anything. And so I searched and searched for days on end, trying to find the right configuration of words. And although intellectually, I could bullet point the big ideas that I wanted to share about Me Too and this movement that I founded, I kept finding myself falling short of finding the heart. I wanted to pour myself into this moment and tell you why even the possibility of healing or interrupting sexual violence was worth standing and fighting for. I wanted to rally you to your feet with an uplifting speech about the important work of fighting for the dignity and humanity of survivors. But I don't know if I have it.

The reality is, after soldiering through the Supreme Court nomination process and attacks from the White House, gross mischaracterizations, internet trolls and the rallies and marches and heart-wrenching testimonies, I'm faced with my own hard truth. I'm numb. And I'm not surprised. I've traveled all across the world giving talks, and like clockwork, after every event, more than one person approaches me so that they can say their piece in private. And I always tried to reassure them. You know, I'd give them local resources and a soft reassurance that they're not alone and this is their movement, too. I'd tell them that we're stronger together and that this is a movement of survivors and advocates doing things big and small every day.

And more and more people are joining this movement every single day. That part is clear. People are putting their bodies on the line and raising their voices to say, "Enough is enough."

So why do I feel this way? Well ... Someone with credible accusations of sexual violence against himwas confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, again. The US President, who was caught on tape talking about how he can grab women's body parts wherever he wants, however he wants, can call a survivor a liar at one of his rallies, and the crowds will roar. And all across the world, where Me Too has taken off, Australia and France, Sweden, China and now India, survivors of sexual violence are all at once being heard and then vilified. And I've read article after article bemoaning ... wealthy white men who have landed softly with their golden parachutes, following the disclosure of their terrible behavior. And we're asked to consider their futures.

But what of survivors? This movement is constantly being called a watershed moment, or even a reckoning, but I wake up some days feeling like all evidence points to the contrary.

It's hard not to feel numb. I suspect some of you may feel numb, too. But let me tell you what else I know. Sometimes when you hear the word "numb," you think of a void, an absence of feelings, or even the inability to feel. But that's not always true. Numbness can come from those memories that creep up in your mind that you can't fight off in the middle of the night. They can come from the tears that are locked behind your eyes that you won't give yourself permission to cry. For me, numbness comes from looking in the face of survivors and knowing everything to say but having nothing left to give. It's measuring the magnitude of this task ahead of you versus your own wavering fortitude. Numbness is not always the absence of feeling. Sometimes it's an accumulation of feelings. And as survivors, we often have to hold the truth of what we experience. But now, we're all holding something, whether we want to or not. Our colleagues are speaking up and speaking out, industries across the board are reexamining workplace culture, and families and friends are having hard conversations about closely held truths. Everybody is impacted.

And then, there's the backlash. We've all heard it. "The Me Too Movement is a witch hunt." Right? "Me Too is dismantling due process." Or, "Me Too has created a gender war." The media has been consistent with headline after headline that frames this movement in ways that make it difficult to move our work forward, and right-wing pundits and other critics have these talking points that shift the focus away from survivors. So suddenly, a movement that was started to support all survivors of sexual violence is being talked about like it's a vindictive plot against men. And I'm like, "Huh?"

(Laughter)

How did we get here?

We have moved so far away from the origins of this movement that started a decade ago, or even the intentions of the hashtag that started just a year ago, that sometimes, the Me Too movement that I hear some people talk about is unrecognizable to me.

But be clear: This is a movement about the one-in-four girls and the one-in-six boys who are sexually assaulted every year and carry those wounds into adulthood. It's about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year and the indigenous women who are three-and-a-half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities, who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It's about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18, and the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can't afford to quit.

This is a movement about the far-reaching power of empathy. And so it's about the millions and millions of people who, one year ago, raised their hands to say, "Me too," and their hands are still raised while the media that they consume erases them and politicians who they elected to represent them pivot away from solutions. It's understandable that the push-pull of this unique, historical momentfeels like an emotional roller-coaster that has rendered many of us numb. This accumulation of feelings that so many of us are experiencing together, across the globe, is collective trauma.

But ... it is also the first step towards actively building a world that we want right now. What we do with this thing that we're all holding is the evidence that this is bigger than a moment. It's the confirmation that we are in a movement. And the most powerful movements have always been built around what's possible, not just claiming what is right now.

Trauma halts possibility. Movement activates it.

Dr. King famously quoted Theodore Parker saying, "The arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice." We've all heard this quote. But somebody has to bend it. The possibility that we create in this movement and others is the weight leaning that arc in the right direction. Movements create possibility, and they are built on vision.

My vision for the Me Too Movement is a part of a collective vision to see a world free of sexual violence, and I believe we can build that world. Full stop. But in order to get there, we have to dramatically shift a culture that propagates the idea that vulnerability is synonymous with permissionand that bodily autonomy is not a basic human right. In other words, we have to dismantle the building blocks of sexual violence: power and privilege. So much of what we hear about the Me Too Movementis about individual bad actors or depraved, isolated behavior, and it fails to recognize that anybody in a position of power comes with privilege, and it renders those without that power more vulnerable.Teachers and students, coaches and athletes, law enforcement and citizen, parent and child: these are all relationships that can have an incredible imbalance of power. But we reshape that imbalance by speaking out against it in unison and by creating spaces to speak truth to power. We have to reeducate ourselves and our children to understand that power and privilege doesn't always have to destroy and take -- it can be used to serve and build. And we have to reeducate ourselves to understand that, unequivocally, every human being has the right to walk through this life with their full humanity intact.

Part of the work of the Me Too Movement is about the restoration of that humanity for survivors,because the violence doesn't end with the act. The violence is also the trauma that we hold after the act. Remember, trauma halts possibility. It serves to impede, stagnate, confuse and kill. So our work rethinks how we deal with trauma.

For instance, we don't believe that survivors should tell the details of their stories all the time. We shouldn't have to perform our pain over and over again for the sake of your awareness. We also try to teach survivors to not lean into their trauma, but to lean into the joy that they curate in their lives instead. And if you don't find it, create it and lean into that. But when your life has been touched by trauma, sometimes trying to find joy feels like an insurmountable task. Now imagine trying to complete that task while world leaders are discrediting your memories or the news media keeps erasing your experience, or people continuously reduce you to your pain. Movement activates possibility.

There's folklore in my family, like most black folks, about my great-great-grandaddy, Lawrence Ware.He was born enslaved, his parents were enslaved, and he had no reason to believe that a black man in America wouldn't die a slave. And yet, legend has it that when he was freed by his enslavers, he walked from Georgia to South Carolina so that he could find the wife and child that he was separated from. And every time I hear this story, I think to myself, "How could he do this? Wasn't he afraid that he would be captured and killed by white vigilantes, or he would get there and they would be gone?" And so I asked my grandmother once why she thought that he took this journey up, and she said, "I guess he had to believe it was possible."

I have been propelled by possibility for most of my life. I am here because somebody, starting with my ancestors, believed I was possible.

In 2006, 12 years ago, I laid across a mattress on my floor in my one-bedroom apartment, frustrated with all the sexual violence that I saw in my community. I pulled out a piece of paper, and I wrote "Me Too" on the top of it, and I proceeded to write out an action plan for building a movement based on empathy between survivors that would help us feel like we can heal, that we weren't the sum total of the things that happened to us. Possibility is a gift, y'all. It births new worlds, and it births visions.

I know some of y'all are tired, because I'm tired. I'm exhausted, and I'm numb. Those who came before us didn't win every fight, but they didn't let it kill their vision. It fueled it. So I can't stop, and I'm asking you not to stop either.

We owe future generations a world free of sexual violence. I believe we can build that world. Do you?

Thank you.

(Applause)