The LEGACY
2 • July 4, 2018
MeToo’s Tarana Burke: Laying groundwork JOCELYN NOVECK NEW YORK — Not long ago, Tarana Burke took the podium in a hotel ballroom full of admirers — a scenario that’s become somewhat familiar this past year — and told a favorite childhood tale about the time she was forced to run a threelegged race with a cousin who wasn’t, like her, competitive or athletic. She wanted a different partner, because she didn’t want to lose. But her grandfather told her sternly: “We don’t leave anybody behind.” And so she ran the race with that cousin, and lost, but learned a memorable lesson about taking care of those less powerful. Burke took that lesson into her career as an activist and organizer, especially her work with survivors of sexual violence — work that led her to coin the phrase “Me Too,” more than a decade before it exploded as a global hashtag and a slogan for a sweeping social movement. Now, with more visibility than she ever dreamed possible, Burke finds herself in another race — to get the next phase of her own #MeToo work up and running before the spotlight dims. And an important part of that, she says, is to put the focus back where it started — before Harvey Weinstein and the movie stars and red carpets — on survivors, especially women and girls of color, who she says have always been disproportionately impacted by sexual violence.
Tarana Burke “The #MeToo movement is a survivor’s movement,” Burke says. “And it’s for everybody. I just want to make that point extra clear.” In other words, the movement doesn’t leave anybody behind, just like her grandfather told her. But beyond that, how do you take a cultural moment with a powerful mantra, and turn it into a sustainable, working movement? That’s what Burke, 44, is concentrating on now, nine months into the #MeToo era. She’s spending the summer working on final plans for programming at “me too.,” her organization that’s housed at the Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity, the nonprofit where she’s a senior director. The immediate goal: Launching a new online community in the fall, full of resources for survivors across the country.
In a recent interview, Burke decried what she called a persistent false narrative about #MeToo. “After all this time, I still run into people every day who say, ‘You’re anti-men,” Burke said from France, where she was speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival. “They say, ‘All you want to do is make people lose their jobs.’ And it just takes the focus away from what we’re doing.” “These misconceptions are out there, no matter how much visibility I have, and they’re super harmful, because people believe them,” she added. “So the work I am doing with the visibility I have is to try to give people a broader perspective.” Burke has been on a head-spinning ride since the day last October, shortly after the Weinstein story erupted, when actress Alyssa Milano encouraged survivors of sexual assault or harassment to tweet #MeToo. The hashtag spread like wildfire, and it was quickly pointed out that the phrase had originated with Burke. Since then, she’s been balancing her work at Girls For Gender Equity with countless high-profile appearances, where she’s been hailed as a standard-bearer for the movement: the Golden Globes, the Oscars, the Time 100 gala where she was honored as one of the year’s most influential people, and many others. “Part of the challenge is trying to balance all these things,” she says, “managing this level of visibility and also knowing that we have to do a lot
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