Tarana Burke discussed what she said are misconceptions about the anti-sexual violence movement she began a decade ago.
The #MeToo movement has empowered millions of women to share stories of sexual violence and shined light on misconduct by powerful men, but the movement's founder is just as interested in talking about what it is not as she is in discussing what it is.
The movement is not just for women and specifically is not just for the famous, white, cisgender women whose experiences have attracted so much attention since the hashtag went viral in October, Tarana Burke told roughly a thousand people at Rutgers University on Monday.
It is not a witch hunt or an attempt to take down men, she said. It is not only about sexual harassment in the workplace.
And it is not just for people who choose to talk about their experiences, Burke, 44, said in a passionate speech at the College Avenue Gym in New Brunswick.
"The work of #MeToo is about healing," she said. "It's about healing as individuals and healing as communities. And it's about interrupting sexual violence wherever it lives."
Speaking to a receptive crowd that was about one-third men and two-thirds women, Burke said the movement must center on marginalized women, particularly women of color, queer and transgender women, and women with disabilities, whose stories are often overlooked. It has to also include men, whose experiences with sexual violence she said are often childhood abuse.
When men are held accountable for sexual violence by being fired from their jobs or removed from an organization, those are corporate responses to women sharing their experiences and not the point of disclosure, Burke said.
"I've never had a person come to me and say, 'I want to take down this person,'" Burke recalled. "They come and say, 'I need help. This thing is killing me, it's weighing me down, it's sitting in the pit of my stomach.'"
While working at a leadership camp in Selma, Alabama, in 1996, Burke met a girl who disclosed she was being sexually abused at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. Then 22 years old, Burke said she felt immediately connected to the girl and, overwhelmed with emotion, sent her away without saying much.
"Really, all I wanted to say was, 'Baby, me, too. ... This is something that I know and I get, and I hear you and I believe you,'" Burke told the crowd. "That's what I wanted to say, but I didn't have the wherewithal to say it."
A decade later, Burke founded the nonprofit organization Just Be Inc. to support women -- particularly women and girls of color -- who have experienced sexual violence. She said her work focused on strengthening their sense of self-worth so they would believe they were valuable just for existing, despite societal pressures telling them they were not.
The movement also entailed giving girls language to process and understand that what they were going through was sexual assault and was not okay, Burke said. She said she used her own experience with sexual violence to inform what she taught them.
"These girls would disclose their experience with sexual violence, except they didn't know it was sexual violence. They didn't use those words," Burke said. "I had 12-year-old girls telling me they had 21-year-old boyfriends."
On Oct. 15, 2017, triggered by public sexual assault accusations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, a tweet by the actress Alyssa Milano made viral the empathy and solidarity movement that Burke had begun a decade earlier. Burke's first reaction upon seeing women tweeting "me, too" en masse, she said, was to panic.
She feared her efforts would be overshadowed, as she had seen happen to black women's work many times before. Burke followed the hashtag obsessively for hours, she said, until she was struck by a woman who had not only tweeted the words "me, too," but also had shared a deeply personal story of sexual violence.
Burke said she decided then that the focus of her work would not be on who got credit.
"Was I going to be in conflict, or was I going to be in service?" she said. "Because it would have been very easy for me to make this a fight about whose property this is, who did it first."
Milano soon learned Burke had used the phrase "me, too" years before and publicly credited Burke with starting the movement.
The #MeToo movement alone will not end sexual harassment and assault, Burke told her audience at Rutgers. The fervent focus currently on it will not last forever, she said, and many of the people who are now active in combatting sexual violence will likely fade into the background.
"If this went away tomorrow, and if we got 1 percent of those people to continue to engage in this work, we have built an army that we didn't have before," Burke said. "Those of you who are new to this, I need you to stay in it when the attention goes away."
Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Marisa_Iati or on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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