This is a reflection for anyone who went to Tarana Burke’s talk on the evening of Thursday, May 2. I didn’t bring a notepad to her talk and I don’t have any quotes to report here — except the ones that stuck with me. I didn’t plan on writing on her talk at all and I only decided to go to it about five minutes before it started. Still, her words moved me, so I decided to write this.
Burke is a charismatic speaker; she holds the audience in the palm of her hand. She was relatable from the outset, speaking first about her childhood and then her activism in college. She didn’t hide from her experience, but it also didn’t define her talk. She spoke about the weight of carrying around sexual violence for years, and how it was Maya Angelou’s writing and poems that first helped ease some of that burden. She described a defining moment — a tape played in class of Angelou reading one of her poems — and the effect of seeing her role model, who had experienced the same trauma as herself, still able to speak with such joy. At this point, Burke had me hooked. I could finally put a face and a voice to the #MeToo movement that has covered my social media feed for the past two years, and it was a joyous face and a magical voice.
Burke spoke to the origin of #MeToo, which she said did not begin out of triumph. She told the story of a little girl, Heaven, who somehow found the strength to trust a 22-year-old Tarana Burke, only to be let down when Burke was unable to help her. Burke said she did not have the right words for Heaven, she only wanted to say “me too.”
She spoke about language and the need to give it to survivors of sexual violence. Language is something I adore, and to hear Burke speak about weaponizing it for good is a movement I can get behind. Her point was that young children who are abused do not have the words, the language, to explain what happened to them. “Me too” is about changing that.
“Me too” is also about holding people accountable. It’s about holding not only predators accountable, but also you, and me, and the pillars of support that should be there for any victim. Burke stood at the front of the Chapel and challenged our administration to be better, to provide the support that shouldn’t have to be asked for. She gave an example of entering a Rape Crisis Center near her hometown that told her she would have to file a report down at the police station because they didn’t take walk-ins. That sounds an awful lot like the stories some of our students told a few weeks ago at the rally, where they needed to talk to someone, but the counselors were booked out for the next two weeks.
Ms. Burke talked about disease, and how the pervasive nature of sexual violence resembles that of a disease. She talked about how sexual violence doesn’t leave you, as if it were an affliction. I don’t know sexual violence, but I do know disease. My dad passed away from ALS last year. I know how I threw myself into supporting the struggle for a cure to that disease, once someone I loved was affected. You can’t wait for someone you love to suffer sexual violence. Just like any disease, it needs a support group outside of those directly affected in order to cure it.
She challenged us, the men of Hamilton, to “proactively walk the life” of an ally. I am a white, cis-gender, male, with no connection to sexual violence (that I know of.) I have no right to speak about sexual violence. But I have the duty to listen. Thank you, Tarana Burke, for reminding me of that. And thank you, to the C. Christine Johnson Voices of Color Lecture Series, for giving me the opportunity hear her.
