Top 50 Tarana Burke Quotes

I think that Me Too is for everybody. I think it’s important that people feel validated.

If I found a healing tree in my backyard, and it grew some sort of fruit that was a healing balm for people to repair what was damaged, I’m not going to just harvest all of those fruits and say, ‘You cant have this.’ If I have a cure for people, I’m going to share it.

I started doing organizing work as a teenager. I was part of an organization called the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement at 14.

I founded the ‘me too’ movement in 2006 because I wanted to find a way to connect with the black and brown girls in the program I ran.

‘Me Too’ is about letting – using the power of empathy to stomp out shame.

If you give young people enough information, they’ll figure out what to do with it. They just need a little guidance.

I don’t want to get into splitting hairs. Trauma is trauma. I’m not in a position to quantify or qualify people’s trauma.

I want survivors to know that healing is possible.

Nobody can take you out of something, especially if you’re the one who started it.

An exchange of empathy provides an entry point for a lot of people to see what healing feels like.

For every R. Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there’s, you know, the owner of the grocery store, the coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who are doing the same things. But we don’t pay attention until it’s a big name. And we don’t pay attention ’til it’s a big celebrity.

We want to turn victims into survivors – and survivors into thrivers.

We have to come together and speak honestly about what the barriers are within our community – and then tear them down. It’s really that simple.

Smoking is definitely not cool anymore, and the folks who have worked against that have done a great job.

We should collectively be talking to children – as young as kindergarten – about what consent looks like.

As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing.

For every Harvey Weinstein, there’s three or four thousand other pastors, coaches, teachers, uncles, cousins, and stepfathers who are committing the same crimes. We have to keep that in focus and we have to keep talking about it.

There is always a way to get what you need, and I really believe in taking what you have to make what you need.

Get up. Stand up. Speak up. Do something.

I want the women I work with to find the entry point to where their healing is.

Social media is not a safe space.

What does justice look like for a survivor? It’ll mean different things to different communities.

‘Me too’ became a term that was both succinct and powerful, and it was a way to ring up immediate empathy between survivors.

Inherently, having privilege isn’t bad, but it’s how you use it, and you have to use it in service of other people.

Black women have been screaming about famous predators like R&B singer R. Kelly, who allegedly preys on black girls, for well over a decade to no avail.

These movements aren’t about anger. We’re not angrily saying ‘Black Lives Matter.’ We’re declaring it. It’s a declaration. We want to be seen as robust, full human beings that have anger and have joy. We want to be able to just freely have that joy. Like everybody else does.

We all have the right to an opinion, sure, but can we say how someone else should feel?

In many regards, Me Too is about survivors talking to survivors.

Patriarchy doesn’t just make men out to be ogres. Women buy into the patriarchy as well, and women make those comments as well, like, ‘Boys will be boys.’ Women have to undo that stuff, too.

‘Me Too’ became the way to succinctly and powerfully connect with other people and give people permission to start their journey to heal.

You cannot put a song – you cannot put a person’s talent over somebody’s humanity. That’s just insane.

I founded the Me Too Movement because there was a void in the community that I was in. There were gaps in services. There was dearth in resources, and I saw young people – I saw black and brown girls – who are hurting and who needed something that just wasn’t there.

I’m grounded in joy; I’m not grounded in the trauma anymore.

I feel the reason people started using ‘me too’ is there is beauty and power in those words.

The young girls of color that first encountered the ‘me too’ movement in community centers and classrooms and church basements were there not only because they needed a safe space, but because they needed their own space.

People ask me what men can do, and I tell them, even if you’re not a perpetrator, you should believe women – or queer folks – when they say that they have been violated.

I think that women of color use social media to make our voices heard with or without the amplification of white women. I also think that, many times, when white women want our support, they use an umbrella of ‘women supporting women’ and forget that they didn’t lend the same kind of support.

‘Me too’ was just two words; it’s two magic words that galvanised the world.

I’ve done community organizing my whole life and I think to myself, as an organizer, we don’t wait for people to come to us and say, ‘Help us organize something.’ We go out into the community, and we bring the skills to a group of people to organize themselves.

There’s a power in empathy.

When one person says, ‘Yeah, me, too,’ it gives permission for others to open up.

Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child’s play.

At the start of my career – not just Me Too, which is not the totality of my career – I wish I would have known that you don’t have to sacrifice everything for a cause. And that self-care and self-preservation is also a tool that is necessary to do the work.

Everybody has a lane. Everybody has something that they can contribute.

Part of the job is to find out what they need. #MeToo is about helping people find those resources.

The work of #MeToo is about healing. It’s about healing as individuals and healing as communities.

If we don’t center the voices of marginalized people, we’re doing the wrong work.

People are trying to find an outlet to tell their truth.

We have to have something that reaches the masses. That’s what I’ve always known Me Too could do.

I think it is selfish for me to try to frame Me Too as something that I own. It is bigger than me and bigger than Alyssa Milano. Neither one of us should be centered in this work. This is about survivors.