Tarana Burke

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

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

“I feel the reason people started using 'me too' is there is beauty and power in those words.”

“I didn't start Me Too as a hashtag, and had I had the opportunity to, I probably wouldn't have done it that way. I think that what has happened subsequently has been beautiful to watch, but what concerns me is what all of these survivors are going to do now.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“What's interesting to me is that people engage survivors from a place of pity all the time - a place of sympathy.”

“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.”

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

“There are so many different people doing amazing work across the country that I, in my capacity, definitely want to lift up, because they don't get lifted up that often.”

“Sexual harassment does bring shame.”

“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.”

“I wish men would stop telling me how they are not 'bad guys,' how they're 'an exception to the norm.'”

“There are a series of emotions that most survivors go through after disclosing. It starts with feeling great, like the weight on your shoulders has been lifted, and then you're alone with your thoughts, like, 'Why did I do that?' And then, what about the person who gets backlash?”

“Foundations have to think outside the box and maybe expand past the usual suspects that get all of the funding and start thinking about how to reach into communities and support community healing on a more local level.”