Event Report: Tarana Burke

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see Tarana Burke, an activist known most notably for creating the #MeToo campaign, speak at American University this past Saturday, February 10. She had so many great insights to offer young students who are passionate about changing things in their society, and it was really exciting to hear from someone who has managed to find success in using the Internet and social media to advocate for a specific cause.

One of the most important takeaways for me was that Tarana Burke has been an activist forever. It is the kind of family she was brought up in, but her fight was originally focused more around race and advocating for people of color. She said she has to make an active decision everyday to go out and make a difference, which I really liked. You cannot pick and choose when you want to be an activist if you really want to make a difference, and you must be constantly making an effort to change things around you instead of doing a few isolated actions when it’s more convenient for you.

Burke went on to explain that this movement sparked during an after-school empowerment program that she started in Selma, Alabama, and someone had approached her to tell her own story about experiencing sexual assault, and Burke was so thrown off in the moment, but all she wishes she had told her was “Me too, and I believe you”. Burke had been hearing more and more stories from people around her, and realized that this must be a problem all over, and it has been well over a decade of her starting the Me Too campaign.

When Alyssa Milano asked women on Twitter to respond to her tweet writing “Me Too”, which quickly went viral, Burke had to decide as how to respond to all of this as a black woman. She decided to go along with it instead of fight it, even though she was fearful that she would be left out and not given the proper credit for her work in it, but luckily she was recognized for the work that she has done, which does not always happen.

Burke attributes the widespread success of the #MeToo movement to the way this issue was framed. First and foremost, this issue is not about taking down men, it is about creating visibility for women and anyone who has been sexually harassed, exposing just how big of a problem this is, and that it happens knows no boundaries between race, class and gender as well. This is also a movement focused on healing. Now that people feel more safe and comfortable to come out and tell their stories in a way that they actual feel supported and like people believe them. This helped the widespread success because it is not trying to attack any one group of people (though many people, particularly powerful white men, still have taken offense to this movement), but this had the potential for much more backlash that I think was avoided because of how it was framed.