Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

by Tarana Burke

Her post landed on my spirit like life lessons often do: hard, fast, and with aching discomfort.

Every now and then, I find myself right back there with that scared little girl, but I can look to the road map this movement helped me chart to lead me home.

I had found a new thing to become: radical.

But what must she think of me to believe I was a whore at twelve without considering that I might be a victim?

I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the doors Mrs. Sanders had opened for me without the groundwork my mother had laid and the importance she had placed on education and culture, but she sometimes made walking through those doors feel like walking through a minefield.

I felt like part of my role in the organization was as ambassador and success story. Not the “she finished high school and went on to college” kind of success—but the “she left a dark place and found community and purpose” kind of success.

The hypocrisy, the apathy, the sheer depth of it all was unbearable.

I believe that our legacy of living under the oppressive reach of white supremacy has trained us to take on shame that is not ours to carry.

My whole life, my response to harm had been to take what was coming to me, pack it neatly in a container, and put it away. Now, it wasn’t just me who was harmed; it was those I cared about and felt responsible for. And even if I had work to do in understanding that I wasn’t a receptacle for harm—I was certain that my child wasn’t, and neither were the children in my community.

The system had worked, or I’d convinced myself it did, but now it was unraveling, and it was taking me with it.

For the first time in my life my story was completely out of my body and I had finally told it to the one person who needed to hear it most, myself.

Sexual violence doesn’t discriminate, but the response to it does.

Survivors were always silenced, or shamed, and the community seemed to value whatever modicum of honor or prestige the predator represented over the lives and livelihood of the Black girls in that community.

Black folks had seen too many instances of white women’s tears marking the end of Black men’s lives in one way or another.

I don’t believe you can practice love and be in community with folks without an incorporation of accountability as an ethic and a practice.

It didn’t matter anymore that he couldn’t see me because for the first time in a long time I felt like my mother could. He had not won—I had.