2024

Tarana Burke

MeToo Founder and Activist

“We are constantly in struggle. We are constantly pushing back. We are constantly fighting, and we’re constantly raising our voices. The question is finding the frequency that people can hear us.”

What do you feel are the qualities that make for a Power Woman?

A powerful woman? Yeah. I, you know, I look at it. Yeah, I think I, I’ve always thought the most powerful women that I knew, women who were really had sort of a quiet confidence. You know, I think that there’s a lot to be said about clarity and self-assurance. I think there are a lot of people, I’m quite decisive.

And, sometimes people are uncomfortable with that. But I think it is necessary, in order to when you are carrying, having a lot of responsibility or carrying a lot of responsibility, and when you’re accountable to a lot of people, you know. And so working really hard to try to clear away things that are sort of less important so that I can keep my mind focused and clear so that I can be decisive.

You know, it takes a lot of humility to be powerful. It is, there’s a lot of learning that has to happen in positions of power. And if you’re not open to being, you know, a lifelong learner, then you will quickly diminish your power.

The polarized society in the US today seemed to threaten our democratic values, if not our democracy itself. What action can we take to bring the various factions together? Do you feel?

I think these fractions are so deeply made up. And I mean, they’re real. They act out in a very real way. But when you take a closer look at them, they are so deeply made up. I saw this really great commercial. It was like a long form commercial as an experiment where they just put two people in a room and didn’t tell them about one another, and forced them to have conversations. But I think they, like, knew one thing about each other, right? Like two people’s parents had cancer or two, you know, things like that. And when it was all said and done, it was like, you know, one woman who fought for, who was pro-life and one was pro-choice, you know, like people who had really disparate ideas about life and how we live.
I think that is fine for people to have different viewpoints in life. That’s what makes life spicy. That’s what makes life interesting. I don’t think we should all have just one universal view or one universal way of thinking, but I think that we have to live a life that is deeply bound in grace for one another. So that’s the mantra that I use and I’m actually writing a book about it now, so it’s always on my mind.

You know, I learned this when I was a very young girl. Learning to organize is I will not violate your dignity, but I will not compromise mine. Right. And so and the second part of that is when I make a decision, it’ll be to serve everybody, even my enemies. Yeah. If we moved from positions, and said, we need each other, we depend on each other. Our relationships, our lives literally depend on our interrelatedness. And so this divisiveness that we have created, for no other reason, serves people who don’t have our best interests at heart. So our, our racial divisions, our gender divisions, even some of our religious divisions are literally manufactured.

Based on fear?

Yes, they’re based on fear. But they’re based on fears that are innate, right? It’s easy to start people’s fears. But the root cause of them, they’re stirred up by people who need us to be distracted by our divisions while they are making their lives better, right off of the backs of our oppression. Yeah, right. They are becoming more powerful, more wealthy, right?

You know, bigger entities. While we are fighting over you, look at people who are in the constituency that are most devoted to people like Trump, who are MAGA believers at their heart. One of the tenants that he has and his platform is, is dismantling Obamacare, right? Dismantling this system that is set up to give medical coverage to people who have the least of these is the people who are donating their hard earned money to this man who is buying his $69 Bible.

People in the heartland of America that has been decimated by this economy, the failing economy that these people, that people like him have become billionaires off of because of the people who want to get an education and sign up for things like Trump University. Because they just want a chance at life. Yeah, they are no different than the people who are in the inner city who are black and brown, who need a chance at life and need free health care and need a decent education.

When you look at the issues, the issues aren’t racial, the issues are religious. The issues are gendered. The issues are largely economic, political, and there are people who are stirring up those issues from all different corners of the country, and making us believe that they are about divisions that are not real. And so if we were to operate with a level of grace for each other and an understanding of our interconnectedness, it would allow us to put our egos aside.

I say the same thing about sexual violence. We are so–when you think about it from a gender perspective of men and women, right? What happened with patriarchy, patriarchy has done such a job on us men and women. Yeah, that when a woman gets up to speak and opens her mouth to tell her story, her story of trauma, her story of the pain, her story that she’s been holding and just needing to release to save her own life.

Men, many men, and lots of women, cannot hear a woman saving her life. They can only hear a man’s life being ruined. Right? That’s what patriarchy has done. It has created this deep division that says that these two things are disparate. This is a woman who’s just trying to save her life by releasing her story. We can’t hear that, you know.

Patriarchy doesn’t allow us to hear that. All we hear is what man’s life is about to be ruined. Those are the kinds of divisions that we have in our country that are so deeply set by these systems that are in place that benefit from us being apart. So we have to stop looking at individual lives and start looking at the systems that are in place and who’s benefiting from those systems.

And once we start opening our eyes to that, we can start removing these barriers and looking at each other and say, wait a minute, I don’t I don’t survive without you. Right? The East Coast and the West Coast don’t survive without the middle of the country. You know? That this group of people and that group, we don’t survive without each other.

Thank you for sharing that. That’s a really fantastic insight. Do you feel the pursuit of gender equality is the most pressing in today’s world?

What I feel is that we have to see how all of these issues flank each other, right? I think that you can’t have an honest conversation about any one of those issues without talking about, gender equity or sexual violence in particular, sexual and gender based violence. And I think what often happens is that we put a big umbrella over it and say, women’s equality or gender equity, and we don’t get into the weeds of what that is.

So gender equity is a huge issue. Obviously, we should talk about equal pay. We should talk about, you know, the disparate coverage and medical needs and all of these kinds of things, you know, equal access, access to abortion care and health care and all those kinds of things. We could have access to all of those things.

For instance, what does it mean to be the most powerful woman in the country? If you’re still not safe? What is justice without safety? What is equity without safety? So I think that these conversations have to happen in tandem. And what often happens is we feel like we can’t walk and chew gum, right?
But can we honestly talk about gun violence without talking about sexual violence? Is that a real conversation? If you have statistics and we looking at all the mass shootings that have happened in the United States for the last ten years, and then the statistic comes out and says 66% of those mass shootings have a history of sexual and gender based violence, then you’re not having a full conversation unless you’re talking about this.

When we talk about climate change and we look at how climate change is disproportionately affecting women and children, and those women are disproportionately being affected by violence, which in their travels, they’re having to travel because of climate change. And those travels are disproportionately affected by sexual violence. There’s a bigger picture to be told.

What do you think is the number one action we as a society can take towards empowering women and gender equality?

I think that, so part of it is that women, people ask this question all the time about, you know, when will women’s voices finally be heard? Or is this the moment when women’s voices are heard? And I’m always saying women’s voices are constantly being raised. It is. We are constantly in struggle. We are constantly pushing back. We are constantly fighting, and we’re constantly raising our voices.

The question is finding the frequency that people can hear us. Right. It’s not a lack of voice, it’s not a lack of power. It is a lack of vision on the other side. Who decides to look. I think what’s happening in the younger generations is fascinating is that they are demanding, to be seen and heard in ways that our generation as millennials and Gen X and boomers or whatever, that we did not.

And although we have raised our voices and we have, you know, we set the stage for it. We created the fertile ground for what we’re seeing now. They are bearing fruit that I just, I think it’s incredible. And I think what will happen is this young, this next generation will not stand for it. I think we’ve done enough groundwork to, to, to set a stage for them to say this is exactly how we have to exist, and we won’t accept anything else but this existence.

And while the struggle will obviously continue, I think it continues from a place of power that we have that those in other generations may have conceded beforehand. I think we came into it conceding the power and tried to get it back where I think these younger people are kind of like, nope, I’m standing in it and I demand and it should look like this, right?

Just listening to you, I can understand the power of a human being with the passion that you live for, and how that it exudes in every single answer that you give. It makes me feel good to know that there’s people making the right changes for the right reasons. Tell me one thing about yourself related to personal advice that you’ve been given, that you feel has become part of your changing journey?

Ooh, that’s good. That’s a good one. I always have one of the best pieces of advice I got when I was. I had my daughter when I was young. I recognize it as young now, but I had my daughter when I was 23, and my–one of my elders was a mentor, said to me, you deserve, you should have this child because we deserve to see, the world needs to see, what it looks like to raise a child, to be the kind of human that you want to make the world. Right, like this is your opportunity. This is activism, too, she said. This is your opportunity to raise the kind of humans in the world, raise a human in the world the way you want to see the world.

And that has been my mantra in raising my child for the last 26 years, even though they’re an adult now. But at least we never stop raising them right? But it was the best piece of advice for me because it made me a different kind of parent. It made me understand parenting differently, that one my child wasn’t just my own.

What do you feel was the one thing that is kind of this is why I am who I am today?

Community. Yeah. I don’t I would not be here. I wouldn’t understand my role in the world. I wouldn’t know how to function. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have a soft place to land. I wouldn’t have anything without community. I learned the value of community very young. And I’ve been building community for many, many years. And so I have people who I can depend on without even a second thought. And I have people who depend on me. So I have beyond any stranger I’ve met in the street, I have people who I’m accountable to. So it keeps me grounded. Right. But yeah, a community is the number one reason why I’m here today is fantastic about it.

If you could have one person’s job for a day, who would that be?

Anna Wintour. I absolutely love her passion. It is my other passion. I love clothes, I love to dress up, and when I was young, for a very short period of time, it was my other dream to go, I don’t know if I was going to be, probably a fashion writer. I’m not a designer or anything like that, but I love it.

What do you most value in friends or friendship?

I have such good friendships, amazing friendships. I think that we deeply respect each other. You know, we respect each other so much. We respect each other’s boundaries and space. Yeah. I think that’s, I really value the ways that my friends respect and love. We are just a big love affair amongst my circle of friends.

Which trait do you most feel uncomfortable with in yourself, and in others?

You know, I am, as I said earlier, quite decisive. So sometimes I can be a little immovable. There are times with that that jumps out and, and my daughter usually is the only one who can move me. That’s always hard when people are immovable.

What’s your favorite read?

Oh, that’s hard. I wish you could see my books. I have books surrounding me. So that’s, you know, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shanga is one of my favorite books, balanced with, Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye.

What do you consider is the most overrated virtue?

Overrated? I don’t know that you can overrate a virtue. Virtues are so, uh, necessary. I think that people are always accusing love and hope and grace and those kinds of virtues as being overrated. But I don’t think that they’re rated enough, right? I can’t imagine a virtue that is overrated.

I think of virtues and values as lifeblood, and I can’t. They are the things that really keep me centered and focused. When I lose myself, when I feel like I’m drifting away from what feels comfortable in my spirit, I reach for my values, and so it’s hard for me to say there’s a virtue that’s overrated.