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

by Tarana Burke

If all the women who I know who have been sexually assaulted or harassed wrote “me too” as a status … and all the women they know … we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

I’d been doing the work of bringing empathy into the fight against sexual violence for many years now using this language.

Seeing “me too,” the phrase I had built my work and purpose around, used by people outside of that community, was jarring.

Y’all know if these white women start using this hashtag, and it gets popular, they will never believe that a Black woman in her forties from the Bronx has been building a movement for the same purposes, using those exact words, for years now. It will be over.” I was now outright sobbing. “I will have worked all these years for nothing!”

They came forward not knowing what would come next, but feeling far too compelled by the promise of community to let the moment pass them by. They hoped, for the first time, that they might feel less alone by sharing. Here was a woman feeling less alone because she had found a place to be seen.

I am hardwired to respond to injustice.

From the moment I understood that organizing was the work that had to be done to respond to injustice, I knew I wanted to do it in service of my community.

The story of how empathy for others—without which the work of ‘me too’ doesn’t exist—starts with empathy for that dark place of shame where we keep our stories, and where I kept mine.

There is no here without where I was: stuck and scared and ashamed, a place I remained until the need to care for someone else’s shame saved me too.

hope you are able to use my story of finding the courage to say “me too” to help you on your own path.

Unkindness is a serial killer. Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean-spirited, cruel words and actions that poison you over time. I guess that’s why I can’t stand the old children’s rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Every time I hear it, I think to myself: that’s a lie. You can dodge a rock, but you can’t unhear a word. You can’t undo the intentional damage that some words have on your mind, body, and spirit.

I know this because I’m ugly. At least that’s what the world finds new ways to tell me every day.

☹️☹️

This unkindness creates a particular kind of vulnerability. It makes the recipient ashamed, coercing us to be participants in our own torment. Somehow the world convinces us that its unkindness is the cost of admission for sharing space with the attractive—and we believe it. We don’t just believe it, we welcome it, but in degrees. Not usually with a grin and wink—though sometimes we do—but mostly with a scowl, sometimes a foul word, sometimes an attitude, or even a few tears. But there is a small part of us that also feels alive and seen and grateful for that barely there acknowledgment. The flip side is being invisible, unseen, which is equally painful. And the thing is, either one will kill your spirit over time.

I decided that if I wasn’t to be beautiful or cute, then I would lean into what God left me with.

And as painful as that shame was, I also believed that I deserved the pain. I deserved to be tormented by flashbacks and anxiety and fear. I deserved whatever agony awaited me, because I broke the rules. I carried that. I carried that pain, heavy on my back and deep in my flesh. The weight sat on my shoulders, every day, slowly crushing me.

I was carrying so much shame—more than any child should have to confront. But like pain and suffering, shame has no age requirement. There is no set cutoff or start. It’s just there one day and doesn’t leave. At least not of its own free will. On my luckiest days the shame sat on my spirit like a thin film of dust. I saw and felt it, but it wasn’t enough to disrupt things. On the worst days, it was like sliding down a muddy slope, helplessly sinking into the trap below.

But it wasn’t the yelling alone that made the tears fall. It was confirmation of what I thought I truly was—dirty, nasty, and used up.

☹️

I had found a new thing to become: radical.

my rage showed up and the shame disappeared.

I knew the struggle of bottling up emotions that were just below the surface of our skin, begging to be freed.

One of the worst things about surviving sexual violence—of any kind—is that for a period of time you lose the power to make decisions about your own body. Someone else takes control. Whether they physically wrestle or coerce it away, they take it. It is an indescribably dehumanizing feeling. And for that reason, every decision I made afterward was that much more important. That much more precious.

But what must she think of me to believe I was a whore at twelve without considering that I might be a victim? I was too young and scared to ask that question.

There is no question that self-hate severely limits one’s capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly.

😮‍💨

worth—I know how hard it hits when you realize that each life has its own purpose, even the lives of our children, and that purpose is not dictated by our needs.

I opened the pad and at the top of the page I wrote two words. me too.

My baby was sorry. My child was apologizing to me. Because like me, they thought that they had broken a rule. They thought that they were the bad one. How could I have not seen this all along?

You didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing is your fault. Nothing at all. You are not a bad child. You are not in any trouble. Do you understand?”

I was always clear that it had to revolve around the power of empathy, but I didn’t share my story in the workshops. I had been trying to get Kaia to tell me whether something had happened to them, but I had never shared what had happened to me.

“I am okay, my baby. And you will be too. That is what I want you to know.”

I found the freedom to not just hear my own voice but to trust it—even through the mistakes. I found the courage to leave old baggage behind. But more than anything, I was able to clarify and sharpen my vision. I wanted to change the way the world thought about sexual assault, abuse, and exploitation, so that we would stand against it the way we stood against every other social ill.

And then I thought about how sad it must have been for so many Black women and other women of color to watch as white women took a leap of faith and told their stories.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

They want to hurt me, and that comes from a deep hurt inside of them, a place that has to run and hide whenever it hears about sexual violence.

If unkindness is indeed a serial killer, then my revelation is that I was my own murderer. I had taught myself to bend to my own unkindness first, so that I would be able to withstand the unkindness of others. I will not bend anymore.

I—that little girl in the stairwell, that ugly girl in the drugstore, that dirty, used-up dishrag—am also the girl who read voraciously, the girl who turned from fighting other girls to fighting for freedom, the girl who became a woman and claimed her voice as a leader. I am the woman who organized and fought and taught, the woman who despite all odds and in the face of trauma, kept traveling until she found her healing and her worth. I am her. She is me. And we are free.