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

by Tarana Burke

“My baby, listen.” I raised them up so that we were facing each other. “When I was a little girl, a similar thing happened to me. That’s why when I tell you that you are not to blame I know what I am talking about.”

It was two more years before the hashtag #metoo went viral. The viral moment created a space for so many survivors that none of us had ever experienced. So many of the folks who came forward and told their stories or even just said “me too” never thought they could ever say those words, or words like them, out loud, let alone have them validated by others and entertain the possibility of accountability.

It was unheard of.

But no matter how many hashtags there were, how many galas I attended, or how many celebrities supported the cause, I always turned bac...

the reactions to different people telling their stories are far from equal. That is largely why my work has always centered Black and Brown folks—particularly women and girls. The response to our trauma and our truths is wildly different than the response to white women’s.

Everything about R. Kelly’s legacy of manipulation, abuse, exploitation, and brazenness harkened back to my experiences as a child and in communities like Selma, where I saw predators like him protected. 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.

During the taping of my segment for the documentary, as I talked about the devastation of Kelly urinating in the mouth of a little girl on video, memories of my own abuse and my shame and confusion, at being ejaculated on and thinking it was urine, came flooding back.

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 that didn’t happen. What happened instead was a constant wave of attacks from the Black community, mostly men. My entire life has been dedicated to working in, and for, my community. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction from my own folks, but I was. The attacks and harassment were hostile and violent.

The vitriol and attacks didn’t change the fact that so many women had come forward against Kelly, just like they didn’t change the fact that Black women have the second highest rate of sexual violence in this country.

even with these facts, I understood the pain and panic that arose when Black folks heard allegations leveled at Black men. There is no escaping America’s painful history of weaponizing sexual violence as a tool against Black men.

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?

It all makes me sad for my community. My work is met with the old familiar cruelties and deflection of accountability from men, Black men, and boys—my own people, who I love so deeply.

I have been called some version of ugly since I was a teenager—and it’s almost always by Black boys and men. It makes me think of what Carrie Fisher wrote in her memoir, Wishful Drinking,

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the ot...

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.

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 w...