Tarana Burke on the power of empathy, the building block of the Me Too movement

Tarana Burke is one of USA TODAY's Women of the Century. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we've assembled a list of 100 women who've made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years. Read about them all at usatoday.com/WomenoftheCentury.

It was sister-to-sister time, and 12-year-old Heaven was quiet. 

Tarana Burke was an executive with 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, a group that prepares kids to be creative and resilient leaders.

Burke had gone to 21st Century camps when she was a teenager. She knew how special sister time was. "All the guards were down," she said. "You could come and talk about literally anything. They would often turn into space where somebody would talk about some trauma."

Burke had faced trauma of her own but never opened up at camp. "I was a survivor of sexual violence and a child of sexual abuse and did not reveal that. I was glad that the space existed, but I just didn't take advantage of it."

She says Heaven, her little "special," was quiet just like she used to be quiet. "I could just tell there was something she was holding." She calls the girl Heaven to protect her identity.

The session ended without Heaven saying anything. "And then the next day, she found me. ... She corners me almost and is like, 'Ms. T, I need to talk to you.' This was an opportunity for her to get it out."

"It was bad, and it was also familiar. And it was a lot. And I was just like, 'I can't help you.' And so this baby, she's 12, I cut her off and I said, 'I can't help you. I'm going to send you to see Miss Malika. Miss Malika can help you.' "

Heaven was taken aback. "You keep a coat of armor on," Burke said. "It is self-preservation. We can't afford vulnerability in the same way, little Black girls. We're already vulnerable enough. And she had let me in just a little bit, and the minute I rejected that, I saw her put that back on and get tough again. And she left."

Burke wishes she had told her she understood. That none of it was her fault. 

"If, at 12 years old, which was a very crucial moment in my life ... if an adult had said, 'You're not a bad girl, this happened to me too,' it would have changed my whole trajectory."

Me too.

That's where it started, when Burke wanted to find a way for survivors to connect and share empathy for each other. She began talking about her work online in 2006. It later went from grassroots to global. Burke, 46, is now executive director of Me Too International.

But it started in that moment.

Question: Tell me about your work.

Tarana Burke: I actually had the idea of empowerment through empathy before the words "me too," because I thought about how powerful it feels to not be alone. How empowering it is to know you don't have to walk a journey by yourself, to know that you're not the only one. And how inherently powerful it is to do things collectively. And that was the building block for Me Too. 

The work we did with the girls early on before we directly talked about sexual violence was about building self-worth. Self-worth is very different, in my opinion, than self-esteem. Because I felt like every single girls program that came out was about building your self-esteem, and I thought, 'How are you going to build my self-esteem if I don't feel like I'm worthy?' 

I need to be grounded in a sense of self-worth so that I can build my esteem from there. Other than that it's just smoke and mirrors. It's a game of Jenga. I can build up your self-esteem and pull one brick out and the whole thing falls.

I know for survivors of sexual trauma there's a sense of shame. What is the solution for people who still feel that?

Part of what I discovered is that so many of the girls that I worked with did not even think a life without shame was possible. What they've done instead is figure out how to incorporate the shame into their everyday life and live and walk with it as if they had to, as if this is what they deserve, this is the price you have to pay. A lot of survivors do that.

Just like the world finds new ways to tell Black women they're not worthy, survivors are told in so many different ways that the shame is ours, that we are complicit in our own abuse. You have to know that it's possible to rid yourself of the shame first.

I think it takes a long time to build shame resilience because you'll be on the journey for a long time, for many years and do the work, and one thing could pop up and trigger a memory that brings you back to that shameful place.

I think the key is building a toolbox. I think of it in my mind as an imaginary toolbox. What do I need? Is it a book? Is it a song? Is it a friend? Is it another memory I need to come and replace it? But over time we build up our toolbox. So it's not that it's not going to happen again, it's that you now have evidence when your mind whips you back to that place, you have evidence that you don't live here. Those tools you have in that box will help pull you out of that place. Sometimes we're sitting in a room and you think you live there – and all you have to do is open the door. "Oh my God, there's a whole world out here. Why was I in this dark cruddy room with no windows and no air?"

Where are you on your journey?

My journey is ongoing. I did a lot, a lot of work for a lot of years. And in the beginning of Me Too going viral, I had a couple of moments where I felt like all of that work had come unraveled. Where it was just I was being triggered again, I was having flashbacks again. I was dealing with old insecurities that I thought I had beat back.

People are cruel and once you become a public figure and a person in the media, a change-maker, they think you're going to change the status quo, they get ugly and mean. I had to open my toolbox and find some new tools. 

You say it's painful to know how little people understand the inner workings of sexual violence. 

I once posted on Twitter that if we could maybe switch out the word "rape" for "murder," that maybe people would get it when you say things like, "I heard that he supposedly murdered four or five women on campus but I'm not sure, it could be true, it could not be true." 

Swap out the word "rape" for "murder" and sit with how that makes you feel and how you would respond differently if the word was "murder" because people don't understand sexual violence as a type of murder — you are killing somebody's spirit, you are killing somebody's emotional stability. You are taking away our ability to make decisions about our own body. And that is dangerous, it is unconscionable that we could just dismiss that. 

You work with women who are survivors, particularly women of color. Tell me how that experience is treated differently.

We know sexual violence doesn't discriminate. We know that there's no demographic you could name that is exempt from experiencing sexual violence, no community. 

We don't hear about the sovereignty issues that allow white men to go into reservations and rape Native women on those reservations and then leave and not face any consequences. We don't hear about that. We don't know that 60% of Black girls will experience sexual violence before they turn 18 years old. Because if we did, I would believe, I would want to believe, that we would want to interrogate that and we would also take responsibility for that as a country.

It is my job, I think, to amplify and elevate the voices of the most marginalized amongst us. I've always been really clear that I center Black women and girls. And that is not to the exclusion of anybody else. And, in fact, I try to explain to people is that you want that. You want a leader, a person who comes in with a vision that centers the most marginalized because it's the only way to ensure that everybody gets what they need.

You want to make clear that #MeToo is not the Me Too movement. 

#MeToo was a moment in history that elevated the Me Too movement, that amplified it and sent it off into the stratosphere and made it incredibly visible. But if we consider #MeToo the movement, then we will only define Me Too in the ways that the mainstream media has, then we will only ever be looking for who's the next case? Who's the next person who's going to get Me Too'd?

#MeToo has centered around pop culture and hype and not really around structures and systems that allow for sexual violence to be what it is. #MeToo is historic and I wouldn't be here without it. We wouldn't be talking about sexual violence, we wouldn't have a sustained conversation. But I believe in vision, and movements are carried by vision. If we have a limited vision that the hashtag gives us, then we won't ever make the kind of progress that's necessary to actually look like we might end sexual violence. To get to a place where we have a generation of young people who are disgusted by it, who are programmed and socialized in such a way that they think about rape the way they think about murder.

That can happen. That can absolutely happen. But it's not going to happen if we only focus on is Matt Lauer in his summer home? Will he make a comeback? Can we listen to Louis C.K. jokes again? That's not going to make it happen.

Do you have a guiding principle or a saying that keeps you grounded?

Yeah, I don't facilitate bull----. It's my favorite saying. We are faced with so much, especially as women, so many situations where we have to be meek or we have to just put up with bull---- and not call a thing what it is. And it just doesn't serve me.

What advice would you give your younger self? 

I think I would go back and tell my younger self that it's OK. This thing, this being as loud as you are, being as forward as you are, as outgoing as you are, all of that is OK. That you don't have to feel any kind of way about it.

I would also say that you don't have to hide. I spent a lot of years being loud and outspoken and all of that to hide the trauma that I was dealing with.

I wish I knew how much trauma turns into stress that lives in your body and affects the way you move, the way you think, the way you live, and I would have done more work early on.

Who paved the way for you, and who are you paving the way for?

My gosh, so many Black women paved the way for me. Women leaders from the civil rights movement that we don't hear their names enough, who we don't talk about enough.

And also the girls. I've worked with hundreds of girls in my career. Kids will get you right. They will keep you humble. 

And for other young people who are curious and who are anxious and who want to contribute and think that they have to wait, I'm hoping that I'm paving the way for them.

You don't have to wait. My life is proof that you can start where you are with what you have in the capacity that you have and make a difference.

Nicole Carroll is editor-in-chief of USA TODAY. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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