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

by Tarana Burke

the exchange of empathy between survivors of sexual violence could be a tool to empower us toward healing and into action.

You can’t undo the intentional damage that some words have on your mind, body, and spirit.

Somehow the world convinces us that its unkindness is the cost of admission for sharing space with the attractive—and we believe it.

I didn’t hold my abusers accountable—I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong. It was this thinking that also kept me from ever identifying as a survivor. I didn’t even identify as a victim.

wasn’t allowed to do things like wear red, white, and blue or participate in the Pledge of Allegiance. “What are you pledging to?” he would say. “This country doesn’t keep its promises!”

hood, but it was the first place I learned the value of using what you have to create what you need.

I would go to confession regularly to confess a “cover sin”—lying, swearing, or something else instead of what I really held inside. I’d quietly ask God for forgiveness for lying, and then I’d redeem myself by doubling whatever penance the priest gave for the cover sin. He would instruct me to pray my rosary, starting with the Apostles’ Creed, and to follow that with some number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. In my mind, if I just doubled that number, I would set things right. I

They Came before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima and Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr.

Growing up, I had a short list of emotions to cycle through: happy, sad, fear, and anger. I couldn’t quite grasp the other ones: shame, grief, vulnerability, and emotional pain. I didn’t understand anxiety, so I had no way to explain the fluttering in my chest and rock-hard feeling in my stomach that paralyzed me at any given moment. I didn’t understand why I had to keep these things to myself; I just knew I had to. I had to keep performing. And there was no air—for me, a dark-skinned Black girl who had been damaged and used. There was no air for me to be anything but what “they” said I was. Girls like me didn’t get the air to cry, the air to release our shame—

I was suddenly staring my duality in the face. Because of Maya Angelou’s words, maybe I didn’t have to be either that dirty, nasty, fast girl or the perfect little Catholic girl. Maybe I could just be a Black Queen like all of the conscious hip-hop songs said I was. Even if I didn’t believe it all the time, Maya Angelou had given me a model for how to step out into the world and make them believe it.

I believed her. I believed that she felt like a Phenomenal Woman as she delivered each line with an audacity and authenticity I had never seen before. I felt like I knew the kind of pain she had to be holding because it was the same pain I held every single day.

Me wanting to use Phenomonal Woman for auditions. Conecting to it as a gay woman

If what I saw was real, how could a body that holds that kind of pain also hold joy?

21C gave me the tools and courage to use that consciousness to change my community. They trained us to strategize and organize, to recognize and fight against injustice, and to think of ourselves as leaders at any age, whether we were out in front speaking or doing our part in the background.

The jogger had never even identified the five Black boys as her attackers.

And she did the thing that so many people have the audacity to do: she corrected my feelings.

There is no question that self-hate severely limits one’s capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly. Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in discussions of love.

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.

wanted so desperately to be free—to lean into the life I kept getting glimpses of.

It still felt stuffy to me, but it was a lesson in how collaboration and preparation are just as important as passion.

felt powerful. I had set out to reinvent myself, but it turned out that I didn’t have to start from scratch. I just had to dust myself off, because the best parts were already there.

People came with trauma, and while dealing with trauma wasn’t an official part of the 21C agenda, it existed in so many of us that dealing with it was inevitable.

It is wildly irresponsible to make people feel comfortable enough to open up without being prepared with the resources to help them process their experiences and receive continued support.

After all, I didn’t see my story as my gift, only as my shame.

He said your credibility is your capital with young folks and you have to safeguard it.

It was out of my body for the first time and I was still alive. I was still standing—with my truth on the outside.

I was determined to make sure that my child—who I saw as valuable and raised to feel valued—was not exposed to anyone who saw or treated them differently.

What I saw missing in Diamond and her cousins and so many of these girls was a connection to how valuable their lives, current and future, were.

build a sense of self-worth in Black girls by giving them tools to counteract the messages of worthlessness the world would inevitably push on them. I wanted them to know their history, to think deeply about the kind of contributions they wanted to make in their communities, and to create a road map for getting there

I wanted them to feel seen and heard and valued.

Jendayi Aza, designed to help them map out their lives in ways they could use over and over again as they moved forward in life. It was about interdependence and sisterhood and worth.

Sometimes community is just two people I would explain—as long as there is trust, love, empathy, and compassion.

“You know there is absolutely nothing that can separate you from my love,” I whispered. Kaia jumped and turned to look at me with eyes racing back and forth. I held their sweet little face like I did often and planted a big kiss on their forehead. I said it again but this time with more emphasis and context. “I mean it, my baby, nothing. There is nothing you could do or say or think that could make me not love you. You can tell me anything—absolutely anything—and I will still love you and do everything in my power to help you. Okay?”

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? I

was so hell bent on preventing my child from having the same experience that when it happened, I had not created the space for them to not have the same experience.

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.

After years of enduring in silence and being skipped over as that veil of silence slowly lifted, we deserved to have our stories centered and our pain prioritized for once. Our whole community needed to see this. Black men needed an opportunity to rise up in unison and say, “He is not representative of Black men, and we absolutely reject him and remain committed to the upliftment and empowerment and protection of Black women.”

But surely, I thought, our community could see the difference between a Black man being railroaded by the lies of white folks and Black women disclosing the harm they had experienced from our men?

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.

Carrie Fisher wrote in her memoir, Wishful Drinking, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

I am called into this moment to do something more than represent a movement. It knows that this movement is more than a hashtag and bigger than any one individual.

The work of ‘me too’ and uplifting empathy in our communities is far from done. 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.

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.