#Metoo founder still working
Not long ago, Tarana Burke took the podium in a hotel ballroom full of admirers — a scenario that’s become somewhat familiar this past year — and told a favorite childhood tale about the time she was forced to run a three-legged race with a cousin who wasn’t, like her, competitive or athletic.
She wanted a different partner, because she didn’t want to lose. But her grandfather told her sternly:
“We don’t leave anybody behind.” And so she ran the race with that cousin, and lost, but learned a memorable lesson about taking care of those less powerful.
Burke took that lesson into her career as an activist and organizer, especially her work with survivors of sexual violence — work that led her to coin the phrase “Me Too,” more than a decade before it exploded as a global hashtag and a slogan for a sweeping social movement.
Now, with more visibility than she ever dreamed possible, Burke finds herself in another race — to get the next phase of her own #Metoo work up and running before the spotlight dims. And an important part of that, she says, is to put the focus back where it started — before Harvey Weinstein and the movie stars and red carpets — on survivors, especially women and girls of color, who she says have always been disproportionately impacted by sexual violence.
How do you take a cultural moment with a powerful mantra, and turn it into a sustainable, working movement? That’s what Burke, 44, is concentrating on now, nine months into the #Metoo era. She’s spending the summer working on final plans for programming at “me too.,” her organization that’s housed at the Brooklynbased Girls for Gender Equity, the nonprofit where she’s a senior director. The immediate goal: Launching a new online community in the fall, full of resources for survivors across the country.
“I suspect that in a year or two, it won’t be as newsworthy,” she says. “The thing that WILL be newsworthy will be the ways that we’re moving the needle to end sexual violence.”