Tarana Burke

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.

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

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

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

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.

Men need to help reshape the conversation around consent.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

So many people who deal with sexual harassment don't have the means to file lawsuits or to get legal representation or legal advice.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Social media is so immediate and in your face that I know many people have been helped and many people who have been traumatised by their entire timeline filled with 'me too.'

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

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.