May 13, 2021 • 36 mins
It was the fall of 2017 when the MeToo Movement exploded. It seemed every woman on social media was typing #MeToo. The reality of how many people had experienced some sort of sexual harassment, assault or other violence shocked nearly everyone. MeToo was the charge that galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world. MeToo = You Are Not Alone.
The founder of the MeToo Movement, Tarana J. Burke, talks with Laverne about how the narrative has changed from focusing on the survivors to focusing on the guilty and how she’s working on reclaiming the original intent of the message. //
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Book: You Are Your Best Thing
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show of Reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. We know the
painful history of black men and law enforcement and black
men being falsely accused, mostly by white women mostly right.
(00:22):
That is a truth that were nobody's trying to ignore
that or erase it. What actually gets a race is
that we focus on that conversation and we don't focus
on the sexual violences weaponis against black women too. Hello everyone,
and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox.
(00:46):
It's been more than three years since hashtag me too
went viral and the country experienced the reckoning around sexual
harassment and violence we had never seen before. It was
my hope that many necessary conversations would finally happen around
consent and what envisioning a world without sexual violence might
look like, and the systemic change that can make that
(01:09):
vision a reality. Those conversations certainly have been happening, but
I feel like they've often been drowned out by the
backlash by narratives that have sought to make the me
too movement about something it's not. I'm interested in shifting
the conversation back to the original intent of the Me
Too movement, envisioned by its founder, Toronto Burke. Toronto Burke
(01:34):
has been an activist and advocate for survivors of sexual
violence for almost thirty years. Her work also encompasses racial justice,
anti violence, and gender equity. She's the founder of the
Me Too movement, which she originated in two thousand six
but it went violent two thousand seventeen, which to date
has galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world.
(01:55):
She is the founder of Just Being, Inc. And co
editor of the new book with Renee Brown, You Are
Your Best Thing. Please enjoy my conversation with Toronto j Burke.
Hello to Ranna, and welcome to the podcast. How are
you feeling today? Oh today, I'm so glad you said
(02:17):
today Today I'm okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah, today I'm okay.
Have things not been okay? Oh god, It's been such
an up and down just time period. So yeah, I've
been like I just had a whole bunch of different
things happening. So but I'm okay now. So how beautiful
it is that today, in this moment, you are okay.
(02:37):
I love that because all we have is this moment.
Can't I tell you. When I was preparing for this,
I discovered that you went to Alabama State University. My
mother went to Alabama State University. How did you end
up at Albama State University because you were born in
the Bronx. Yeah. I was a part of a youth
leadership program called Century Youth Leadership Movement that was founded
(03:00):
civil Rights and you know, veterans of the movement, and
they were based in Selma. And I was in that
program through most of high school. And when I graduated
high school, I got into the schools I wanted to
get into. I wanted to go to Clark Atlanta University,
and I didn't have the money. And so the woman
who founded the organization, she was like, let me help
(03:22):
you get into another school, and she got me into
alban State. And I had never even thought about it.
But I'm glad I went. I'm so glad I had
I had both an HBCU and a p W I experience.
I love it, I love it. I love it so.
But I was preparing for this, there were so many
moments watching interviews, listing to podcast, watching speeches where I
(03:43):
would just become overcome with emotion to start crying, and
there's just a lot of that, and in a good way,
in a good way. But just in thinking about the
Me Too movement, you we all know that you're the
founder of the Me Too movement and the no mission
of me Too was empowerment through empathy. And I was
(04:03):
thinking about today and having this conversation with you. I
literally lit a candle. This is the first time with
lit a candle for a podcast, because it absorbing your
work and the impact that you've had. As I prepare
for this, I wanted to try to create a sacred
space for this conversation. I think there is a sacredness
in me Too, because there's a sacredness and empathy. There's
(04:25):
a sacredness in the space that you have created for
so many survivors. And and the real reason I wanted
to have this conversation with you, there's so many of
the I'm gonna talk to you about, but I think
that we've gotten derailed, your original intent has gotten lost,
and how people want to frame it for their own
sort of political ends, and just people being um confused
(04:49):
about what it's about. And then it's so difficult to
hold the space for the trauma, right, the trauma that
is at the heart of sexual assault and and a
survivor of that. So I guess I want to start
with you where are you today? With the founding of
the mew Too movie. Yeah, well after the Kavanaugh hearings
(05:11):
in eighteen. They came right at about a year after
Me Too went viral. So I spent that year. I
had this tumultuous yet it was crazy good but also
crazy strength, right, and I felt very much like so
much good stuff had happened. And yes, people knew who
I was, but they didn't really know my work because
(05:32):
I had been kind of pulling all these different directions
to represent this or that for other people, and I
had to take a step back from I'm going to
be like, you know, I have a very clear vision
about what my offering was in the work to in
sexual violence. And that's why I started the organization, which
I actually never thought I would. I didn't want to
start another nonprofit and like, there's the world in another nonprofit,
(05:53):
but I thought it was really important to create a
container for the for the work to happen in and
so I I'm so glad I did that, and I'm really,
really proud of how we have been reclaiming for the
last two or three years. Right, it's just been constant work.
But we have great things happening Survivor Summer, me too,
(06:14):
voter and all this other stuff. We're still working up
against this mainstream narrative of what need too is. And
so the first thing that people should think of when
they hear the words me too is about the people
who actually said it, right, the people who are using
that phrase to identify as a part of this larger group.
We should not automatically think about a headline about Hollywood
(06:35):
about perpetrators. We should think about the human beings whose
lives have been adversely affected by this these traumatic experiences,
and that that's our goal to shift the narrative so
that me too is synonymous with survivors and the empathy
that is inherent in me too. Write absolutely, what's so
exciting for me about me too? It is just as afraid.
It's like I'm not alone, You're not alone. We can
(06:57):
be in community healing, and that healing space, that empathic space,
is what we need in the world right now. And
exactly the fact that we can't that that's been co
opted and corrupted speaks, I think to our inability to
sit in the uncomfortability and the vulnerability of what is
required to really be empathetic. That's right. The original intent
(07:19):
is still intact, and the work we're joined with survivors
on the ground in coalition with other organizations. It's very
much true to that. But as long as the mainstream
narrative is like who's next, and you know, who got
me too? To that kind of thing, it will still
have the same issues that we have around backlash and
around people understand misunderstanding. And that's harder, right, that's much harder.
(07:41):
That's like breaking into Hollywood. That's like getting in writer's
rooms and getting mainstream media too to adjust the way
they talk and think about us as survivors um but
also us meaning black women, and us meaning like all
kinds of us. Is that they don't think about when
they talk with this work. What is so beautiful about
(08:04):
the founding of Me Too is that it started with
centering the lived experiences of black and brown girls in Alabama,
some of the folks who were most marginalized with with
sexual assault, but in all aspects of society, and so
much of the narratives always wants to sort of focus
on the perpetrators and how their lives are being sort
of ruined, or the due process questions. And what I
(08:26):
got excited about when me Too went viral was that
I was like, oh, we can, maybe we can finally
have a conversation about what consent looks like. I think
a lot of men, specifically and potential perpetrators are real confused.
Remember years ago, I had read an article on the
good Man Project and a guy had written about basically
how he had assaulted this woman and realized after the
(08:49):
fact and like he fled the city. But he talked
about all the sort of conflicting messages that he had
gone from the media, all of around no meaning yes,
and like us needing to have a conversation around And
I was like, oh my god. People don't always understand
that they have not consented. I recently had the opportunity
to confront a man who had basically sexually assaulted me
too about thirteen years ago, and he it was really difficult, conversations,
(09:14):
really painful, and he didn't realize in that moment that
he had sexually assaulted me and the night had stayed
with him. We hadn't talked about this and we kind
of stayed friends afterwards, which is interesting and deep and
whatever happens all the time, just you know, peripheral friends.
But we never dated after that. And what was interesting
for me is that that night's day with me, you know,
(09:35):
till this day in its day with him as well,
because up until that point, and this is about two
thousand nine or so, he had been dating trans women
since the nineties and non trans women as well, and
he had never been turned down before. He had never
had someone stop a sexual encount and be like, wait, wait,
hold on, whoa you know that it never happened to him.
(09:55):
And I don't want to make this about perpetrators, but
it's like, if we really are serious, it's about ending
rape culture, ending sexual assault. We have to have conversations
about what consent looks like, and we have to be
able to create space. We have to have them early,
and we have to have them early. This is a
good time to take a little break. We'll be right
(10:16):
back though. Okay, that's taken care of. Let's get back
to our chat. I love that you always talk about
ending sexual assault, right and ending a culture of a
sexual assaulty, what is your vision for this. So I think,
(10:39):
you know, I always use this comparison, um, but I
talk about cigarettes and how you know, twenty thirty years ago,
we smoked cigarettes everywhere, and they smoked cigarettes on planes
and in schools and you know, in bars, whatever. And
then we had this onslaught of interventions. We had sort
(11:01):
of research and medical interventions that said secondhand smoke will
kill you. And people said, oh, well, you can't smoke
in a car, and you can't smoke in the house
with your children and your loved ones. Right, because this
research shows that. We had grassroots campaigns that came out
telling the truth about big tobacco and exposing them. We
had media interventions where we stopped seeing people smoking cigarettes,
(11:21):
and TV shows and movies and things like that. We
had legal interventions where big tobacco was sued by certain
you know, different entities. What happened. I think of that as,
you know, loosely a model for what has to happen
for us to be working towards ending sexual bodes. Now,
of course people still smoke, right, that's not It hasn't
ended smoking. But that also wasn't the goal. It was
(11:43):
to make sure people are knowledgeable about it. If we
don't have multiple interventions, multiple visions, right for a plan
that is working towards interrupting and eventually ending sexual violence,
we won't get there. And so I feel like we
need the same level. We need research about how sexual
violence impacts the economy, how it impacts the workforce, how
(12:06):
it impacts communities and cultures, and we need that information
disaggregated by race, by age, by gender, by all of
these different stuff so we really understand the scope of
the problem. It's huge. It's a huge problem. That's research.
We certainly need changes in these laws and policies that
are just woefully inadequate, right, and also things like even
(12:28):
vow which is which has been around for a long
time to violence against women, has all kind of flaws
in it. If there's a there's a push to this
country towards transformative justice or restorative justice or different right,
something different than a Carcero solution, if that's really the
direction we're heading in, then we need to start imagining
and implementing what that looks like now, which means that
(12:49):
we can create systems of transformative justice in our communities
and our institutions that can be replicated. But Essentially, the
vision is that people have to get active on all fronts.
We need narrative intervention. It's not really about policing sexuality
or censoring, but we don't need egregious sexual violence on television. Right,
(13:11):
And if you are using it to make a point
or statement about sexual violence, I think there's some space
for it. But we do need to be more vigilant
and conscious about the ways we show rape culture and
sexual violence portrayed in our mainstream media. So the vision
I have is to work in tandem with other people
in the field to create those interventions. And part of
(13:33):
what we're doing, you know, we have act to this
this new platform that we introduced last year that's really
to activate everyday people. Right. So it's such a huge
problem that it's no way that it can be tackled
without shifting the consciousness of everyday people to think, I
need to do something about this, right, I need to
be involved. We things like comprehensive sex education. Talking to
(13:56):
your point about consent, What would the world look like
if you take a group of kindergarten students right now
and you give them comprehensive sex education that covers the
spectrum right every year and layer it on and and
and and advance it every year so it's you know,
relevant to their age, and not just introduce consent in
(14:18):
tenth grade or in twelfth grade and then send these
kids off the college after watching a video on the
computer that says no means no and dotat. It's just
it's just, honestly, it's just not enough. It is it's outsized,
and it's not enough happening to match the magnitude of
the problem. And so I just I feel like I
have to keep ringing the alarm, and the work that
(14:39):
we do has to keep building coalition across the field.
Because I do think definitely with with giving all kinds
of praise and flowers to the work that's happened on
the ground around sexual violence, I do think there's a
way that some of the big national organizations got really complacent.
(15:02):
You know, think about when me Too first went viral.
There was no immediate response. There's no rapper response from philanthropy,
there was no rapper response from from big mainstream organizations. No,
so many people were used to not talking about it
and not having like a national sustained dialogue. Yeah, that's
(15:22):
really important, But I but I but it's just so.
I mean, there's so many things I think about and
want to talk about, but I but when I do
the deep dive into your work, love and empathy or
at the center, and what feels so beautiful is how
there's space created it through me too. There's space created
through empathy because I hear all the solutions you talk
about it and just like we can't even get fifteen
(15:44):
dollar minimum wage. They just read an article about like
the Secretary of Education I think in New York City
just stepped down and he was trying to desegregate schools
in New York and it couldn't get done. And it's
there's so much bureaucracy, there's so much corruption in this
system that keeps things from getting done. And I think
about how much we are not moving in that space
(16:04):
of love and empathy, that people in power are so
committed to maintaining that power that they used the divide
and conquered. Because I was thinking. Another thing that's come
up a lot recently that you've talked about publicly is
how me too is being framed a lot in the
black community is like an attack on black men. Right.
Oh gosh, yes, I think immediately. This is exactly how
(16:26):
divide and conquered works, right. Let's pit the interest of
black men against those of survivors of sexual assault and
create this narrative where like black men are being persecuted,
which then again erases the voices of survivors racists, like
the voices and experiences of black women and girls. We
can't hold two truths at the same time, and they
(16:46):
are multiple truths actually, when it comes to sexual violence
in the black community. We announced our campaign called We
as Ourselves. It's a collaboration with Times UP and the
National Women's Lost Center, and it really is a campaign
that's been a year in the making about centering black survivors.
And it came on the heels of the backlash of
the Russell Simmons documentary, the r. Kelly documentary, um Gail King,
(17:09):
backlash after Kobe Bryant, Like all of these things compounded.
It was like, why are black women always trashed in
the media when they come forward? You know, It's just
like we need to say something to be really specific,
So we put it up. It is no names involved.
We don't name any perpetrators, we don't even name any survivors.
We literally just say black survivors, not black women. You know,
(17:32):
it's like it's like all black survivors. And the amount
of trolling that has hit my page and me to
his page, it's always what about? What about? What about? Right?
And it's all these black men saying, oh, you hate
black men. We know the white women in Hollywood have
stolen your movement and they use you as a puppet,
And I'm just like, are you all insane? These are
(17:55):
the same people who would not stand up for those
black women survivors when they came forward. So it's it's
so frustrating for me because this should be a moment
for the black community to come together and say I
don't care what you look like, I don't care how
you identify. We will not accept this kind of violence
in our community against anybody. But instead, to your point,
(18:17):
it has become a moment of divide and conquer. It
is absolutely true, and I've said this three hundred thousand
times that sexual violence has been weaponized against black men.
We have a whole history of it that you can't deny,
and it's a painful history. We will never forget Emmetti,
and you can you can bring it from Emmette all
the way up to Brian Banks. Right, and I was
(18:37):
reading the story of the man in Boston who claimed
that his wife had been murdered by black man, and
he actually was the murderer, and they had lockdown Boston
searching for this black man. We know the painful history
of black men in law enforcement and black men being
falsely accused, mostly by white women mostly, right, That is
(19:00):
the truth that we do. Nobody's trying to ignore that
or erase it. What actually gets a raised is that
we focus on that conversation and we don't focus on
the sexual violences weaponis against black women too. We were enslaved,
and and sexual violence was used as a weapon of
torture for us during enslavement, right and and and black
women have had to deal with sexual violence at the
(19:23):
hands of white men, and we've had to deal with
sexual violence at the hands of our own men. There's
no way that we would have the second highest rate
of sexual violence experiences in this country behind indigenous women
if that weren't true. It doesn't say anything particular about
black men, but it creates this complicated conversation because oh, no,
(19:44):
we're not rapists. No, all black men are not rapists obviously, right, No,
you're not. But do black women get raped? Absolutely? Does
it happen at the hands of white men absolutely? Does
it also happen in the hands of black men. Absolutely,
So that at all this truth is out on the
table with love and empathy and compassion, we should be
(20:06):
able to close the curtain and say, yeah, we gotta
have a conversation about this. I think part of what
what the difficulty is for our community when I say
our community, I say black folks, is that when somebody
black does something, then it becomes a reflection of all
black people because of how white supremacy works the whole
community exactly, and when a white man does something, it
does not become a reflection of all white men. So
(20:28):
I think that we have to again, we have to
we have different kind of conversations in the media, and
it needs to be more nuanced. But I also think
about my friend A Lok who I had on the podcast.
We had a conversation a year ago in a look
said in that conversation, some people are not looking for justice.
I think they're looking for privilege. Yes, indeed, And I
feel like, what right, that's a word? What I field
(20:50):
is having grown up in the black church in Alabama,
is that there was such desire I think for some
black folks to have privilege, but in ways that replicate patriarchy.
There's so many, you know, incredible black women who have
been challenging patriarchy since the beginning, right, and who've been
intersectional and amazing. And there are some Black women who
(21:12):
are very interested and invested in patriarchy in a way
that elevates their life exactly, that elevates their particular life
and the life of their particular crowd. I mean, we
know that happens in our community without question. We were
socialized in patriarchy and white supremacy. It's the only model
we have for what power looks like, right, and we
are a community that's constantly having our power taken away
(21:35):
from us or attempts at power taken away from us.
Power is equated to money and wealth and and you know,
education in all these different ways that we have less
than in the community. So absolutely, that is a word.
They're not looking for justice, they're looking for privilege. But
I mean, this is the thing. When I'm hearing this,
like what about white men, I'm like, what about white men?
(21:56):
This is something that's really interesting to me. The reality
of the me too movement hashtag me too is that
it took a swath of white men down right. The
names that you hear associated is our folks weren't paying
attention because it weren't us. So who cares about a
Harvey Wantstein or Charlie Rose and you know whatever. But
this is a list of the New York Times put
(22:16):
out once and it's probably should be updated by now,
but maybe or nineteen of like four hundred men who
have been affected by me too. I went through that
list painstaking me. I can only find nineteen people of color.
Of those people of color, like six of them were
black men. So this as a as a thing in
(22:37):
the world, This is not something that has adversely affected
our community. Nobody is painting black men as the face
of me too. You got r Kelly, you got Russell Simmons,
you got Bill Cosby. Those are the three names of
black men that are most associated with sexual violence and
definitely not representative of the average black man. So this
(22:59):
this kind of this kind of notion that you want
to take down black men, and it's just it's nonsense,
and it's it's from a place of a lot of things.
I think a paranoia, I think triggering around the history
of sexual violence. But I also think, to your friend's point,
beyond the not wanting justice and wanting privilege, it is
a part of an ongoing history that also includes not
(23:22):
protecting black women, not standing up for black women, right,
and when black women stand up for themselves, finding ways
to knock us down. That's just happened. That's just true.
And and the black women who have been standing up
for black men, how about that? Yes, absolutely, And so
many black women who don't come forward because they don't
want to have another black man in the criminal justice system,
(23:44):
And so in the space of the healing that we
might need is subjugated to someone else. And so, gosh,
there's so much you want to talk to you about.
Now feels like a great time for a short right,
we'll be right back then. Okay, we're back. You are
(24:08):
at the editor of the forthcoming book with Burnee Brown.
Can you tell us the title of that book? That book,
as you know, because you're one of our contributors, is
called You Are Your Best Thing, And it's based on
a quote from Tony Morrison's book Beloved and I'm just
I'm so excited about it. I am so grateful that
(24:28):
you contributed to it. I really am, because you know,
Brnee and I became fast friends when we met some
years ago and and have had this you know, ongoing
conversation and relationship because of the ways that our work overlapsed.
And I was so frustrated, quite frankly last summer after
(24:49):
George Floyd was murdered, because I just kept hearing all
of these conversations about how white people can be better,
how about anti racism, about all of these things that
are necessary, but also not enough conversation about the trauma
that black people were holding by watching yet another member
of our community be murdered in the street by people
(25:10):
who are charged with protecting our lives, supposedly right to
know that another Brianna Taylor person would be murdered with
impunity like it just the number, I mean, there's more
than the ones that were public, but even the big
public ones where you have the videos that are played online,
that is traumatic. When you spoke about this last year,
it hit me and this is one of the moments
(25:32):
that when I was preparing for this, why I just
started broke down in tears because I was just like,
these are the words that I need, because I knew
that I was traumatized. I know, I knew that there's
collector trauma around this, but I just after George Floyd
and Tony McDade happened a few days after George Floyd
that's not on video, but then a trans woman with beating,
brutally beating Ayana do your and I just hit a
(25:52):
point where I just too much. I can't, I can't anymore,
I can't read details. This is so traumatizing, and I
love that this book with Renee is sort of a
response to that. Response to that. In the intro, you say,
our humanity, our individual and collective vulnerability, needs and deserves
some breathing realm. Yes, can you talk a little bit
(26:14):
more about the intention of the book. Absolutely, the intention
was to create a space for black people to talk
about how this impacts us. Right. Shame is a tool
of oppression, absolutely, I I and a tool of white supremacy.
I love Renee's work, obviously, and that helped me so much,
and I also found myself contorting to fit into it
(26:36):
in some ways because it didn't fully reflect my experience
as a black woman in this country, and so it
felt like I wanted a space for us to talk
about how shame impacts our lives and how we're resilient
to that shame right in various ways. And also I'm
a black woman. We need to hear the voices of
black transfolks about black weear folks about from black men,
(26:57):
from black young people, black elders. Our lives deserved space
to tell our stories and to just tell our stories,
not in relation to anything else, and not in service
of making white people better. Right. But I do think,
and I said this in the introduction, this is a
precursor to your anti racist work because you have to
(27:20):
be able to engage with black humanity in order to
not be racist. I really believe that if you're just I.
I read the anti racist book, and I do the
anti racist data data out, but you really don't engage
with black humanity, you don't try to understand it, or
think about it, or or have a connection to how
these things actually impact our lives, then your work will
(27:40):
be not as useful, not to you or to anybody else.
So this is an offering, you know, Burnee and I
labeled this and call and talk about this as an
offering first and for almost to the black community, you know,
a place to see ourselves and to see some of
our stories reflected, right, but also an offering to the
world to continue to tell stories and to normalize telling
(28:02):
these stories. Because there's also a piece that's like black
people don't talk about this either. You know. It's also
a little piece because that my piece is about health
and illness and how you know, so many black women
just hold it and don't talk about it and just
soldier through. So there's also an internal conversation for us
to have about some of this stuff too, so so beautiful,
so necessary. Um. In the intro, you say, we often
(28:25):
carry our trauma in similar ways, but the roads that
lead us to the trauma are also different. We must
pay attention to that road. The road, it's our humanity.
The road is the piece that we're talking about. A
lot of times we're happy and relieved to find similarities.
Oh YouTube you to me too, No fun intended. These
(28:46):
experiences create community and it's wonderful, but it is still
critical to understand the different paths that led you to
the trauma. Bernathan replies, that makes so much sense. We
have to know the road if we're going to walk
back down, own it and dismantle the systems that lead
us to trauma. So knowing the road, knowing the road,
(29:07):
and and Brneble talks about owning the story too, and
her work over and over again that she's applied to us,
owning our history. And I love I love that you
connect so much to Burnet's work. I do as well.
And I think in the intro you also talked about vulnerability,
that the vulnerability piece was really hard for you, and
I was just like, oh, and and when you are
a trauma survivor or vulnerability is really difficult. Yeah, yeah,
(29:32):
And it's it's it's triggering. It's like I'm gonna die
if the sensation in our bodies is like I'm gonna die,
I'm not going to survive this if I'm vulnerable. When
you've experienced trauma, and so many black people have experienced trauma,
and vulnerability means something different to us, right to black people,
I think I think there's a there's a different connotation.
It's not just you know, I don't want to trivialize
(29:52):
anybody's experience with with vulnerability, but for us, it can
sometimes mean death. Right, It can mean a a kind
of danger that other people don't experience outside of our community.
So it is it is you tell me to be
vulnerable to who for what? No, no right? You have
to give me more explanation than that. Yeah, But vulnerability
(30:13):
is also the site of all the things that are
dear and wonderful and incredible in our lives. So we
have to be able to create the safe spaces and
we still need it. Yeah, we still need we have
to create the safe spaces so we can be vulnerable exactly.
I also think that in this moment that we have
so much to learn from survivors and survival and the
ideas of empowermental empathy, and healing. We have been traumatized
(30:36):
as a country, right, we have been traumatized as a world, really,
but this country has been through a grossly traumatic experience.
One of the things I've been talking about lately is
that I don't want to do any liberation work that
doesn't have a politic of grace included. We need more love,
We need more space for each other, because particularly those
who are working towards the same things, who have a
(30:58):
liberation ideology g and who are thinking towards being more
free in this world and having a more just world.
We definitely need to have more grace for each other.
It's not a competition. We need to be working more
in tandem, but certainly without empathy and love and some vulnerability,
we won't get there. I love it. I love it.
I love it. Thank you for that. So I like
(31:22):
to end the podcast with a question, and the question
is what else is true? And it's about really what
helps you get through? And it's resetting our nervous system.
So what are the things or the one thing or
the thought or the sensation that helps you get through?
A resource for you in your life today? What else
is true for you? Toronto Burke? What else is true?
What else is true? Is that I am gentle, right
(31:47):
I am. I am not rough around the edges all
the time. I'm not, you know, badass all the time.
I am my own soft place to land sometimes and
then and I don't think I acknowledge that enough. I
don't know if that's what you mean and when you're
asking that question, but that's what came to my mind first,
(32:08):
as on my own resource sometimes is that what helps
you get through? Sometimes? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, Sometimes being my
own resource. It is, it is, certainly its supposed to
be on my mind lately. I just feel like, you know,
as black women, we always are kind of made to
feel like you have to be hard as bricks and
you know, sharp edges, and I'm like, na, that's not
(32:30):
really who I am all the time, I'm not and
I don't want to be. And so I try to
be my own, create my own gentleness for myself because
people won't give it to you. I love that so much.
So can you just tell people where to find you?
Tell them your website. Absolutely, get to know more about Toronto. Well,
(32:54):
I think I'm just Toronto Burke on Everything or maybe
Toronto Janine on Instagram. And of course me to movement,
please go to ours. It's me to envy empty dot org.
Our website has a ton of resources for survivors and
if you're not a survivor and you wanted to support survivors,
to support the movement, you should go there to visit
our active platform. We as ourselves that the campaign has launched,
(33:18):
so go check that out. The book You Are Your
Best Thing, and this fall my memoir will drop, so
stay tuned for that. Hopefully, I'll be back to talk
about it. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Thank you, Thank you for
the work, thank you for being a survivor. Thank you
for creating this space for empowerment through empathy. I freaking
love that. Thank you. Thank you, Leverd. I freaking love you.
(33:41):
You are so so, so, so so special. Thank you.
I love Toronto Brook so much. What hits me in
my gut after listening to our conversation is the difficulty
and wrapping words around the vulnerability required to heal, especially
(34:03):
for those of us who are survivors of sexual assault.
If you're a trauma survivor, vulnerability can feel like death.
And if you're a black, a woman, trans a person
with a disability, or at the intersection of a few
or all of these experiences and more, trauma could be
a huge component of your story. But allowing ourselves to
(34:26):
be vulnerable, I feel it's the only way we can
truly heal. Burnet Brown defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and
emotional exposure. I can testify that allowing myself to be vulnerable,
allowing myself to confront the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure
tied to my various traumas. Has often felt like I
(34:50):
was going to die, that I couldn't survive, the pain,
the shame just below the surface. But confronting those difficult
things did not kill me. I'm still here and more
revealing it from the process to Rono Burke's work and
the phrase me too as a reminder we are not alone.
(35:21):
Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. Please rate, review, subscribe,
and share with everyone you know. You can find me
on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook
at Laverne Cox for Real. Join me next week when
I talked to Kevin Allred, an award winning author, speaker,
and educator, about our mutual love and respect for the Queen,
(35:44):
the Diva herself, Queen be Sasha Fears, the One and
Only Beyonce, and how her music interrogates American race, gender
and sexual politics. Until next time, stay in the love.
The Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shondaland Audio
(36:05):
in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show of Reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. We know the
painful history of black men and law enforcement and black
men being falsely accused, mostly by white women mostly right.
(00:22):
That is a truth that were nobody's trying to ignore
that or erase it. What actually gets a race is
that we focus on that conversation and we don't focus
on the sexual violences weaponis against black women too. Hello everyone,
and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox.
(00:46):
It's been more than three years since hashtag me too
went viral and the country experienced the reckoning around sexual
harassment and violence we had never seen before. It was
my hope that many necessary conversations would finally happen around
consent and what envisioning a world without sexual violence might
look like, and the systemic change that can make that
(01:09):
vision a reality. Those conversations certainly have been happening, but
I feel like they've often been drowned out by the
backlash by narratives that have sought to make the me
too movement about something it's not. I'm interested in shifting
the conversation back to the original intent of the Me
Too movement, envisioned by its founder, Toronto Burke. Toronto Burke
(01:34):
has been an activist and advocate for survivors of sexual
violence for almost thirty years. Her work also encompasses racial justice,
anti violence, and gender equity. She's the founder of the
Me Too movement, which she originated in two thousand six
but it went violent two thousand seventeen, which to date
has galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world.
(01:55):
She is the founder of Just Being, Inc. And co
editor of the new book with Renee Brown, You Are
Your Best Thing. Please enjoy my conversation with Toronto j Burke.
Hello to Ranna, and welcome to the podcast. How are
you feeling today? Oh today, I'm so glad you said
(02:17):
today Today I'm okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah, today I'm okay.
Have things not been okay? Oh god, It's been such
an up and down just time period. So yeah, I've
been like I just had a whole bunch of different
things happening. So but I'm okay now. So how beautiful
it is that today, in this moment, you are okay.
(02:37):
I love that because all we have is this moment.
Can't I tell you. When I was preparing for this,
I discovered that you went to Alabama State University. My
mother went to Alabama State University. How did you end
up at Albama State University because you were born in
the Bronx. Yeah. I was a part of a youth
leadership program called Century Youth Leadership Movement that was founded
(03:00):
civil Rights and you know, veterans of the movement, and
they were based in Selma. And I was in that
program through most of high school. And when I graduated
high school, I got into the schools I wanted to
get into. I wanted to go to Clark Atlanta University,
and I didn't have the money. And so the woman
who founded the organization, she was like, let me help
(03:22):
you get into another school, and she got me into
alban State. And I had never even thought about it.
But I'm glad I went. I'm so glad I had
I had both an HBCU and a p W I experience.
I love it, I love it. I love it so.
But I was preparing for this, there were so many
moments watching interviews, listing to podcast, watching speeches where I
(03:43):
would just become overcome with emotion to start crying, and
there's just a lot of that, and in a good way,
in a good way. But just in thinking about the
Me Too movement, you we all know that you're the
founder of the Me Too movement and the no mission
of me Too was empowerment through empathy. And I was
(04:03):
thinking about today and having this conversation with you. I
literally lit a candle. This is the first time with
lit a candle for a podcast, because it absorbing your
work and the impact that you've had. As I prepare
for this, I wanted to try to create a sacred
space for this conversation. I think there is a sacredness
in me Too, because there's a sacredness and empathy. There's
(04:25):
a sacredness in the space that you have created for
so many survivors. And and the real reason I wanted
to have this conversation with you, there's so many of
the I'm gonna talk to you about, but I think
that we've gotten derailed, your original intent has gotten lost,
and how people want to frame it for their own
sort of political ends, and just people being um confused
(04:49):
about what it's about. And then it's so difficult to
hold the space for the trauma, right, the trauma that
is at the heart of sexual assault and and a
survivor of that. So I guess I want to start
with you where are you today? With the founding of
the mew Too movie. Yeah, well after the Kavanaugh hearings
(05:11):
in eighteen. They came right at about a year after
Me Too went viral. So I spent that year. I
had this tumultuous yet it was crazy good but also
crazy strength, right, and I felt very much like so
much good stuff had happened. And yes, people knew who
I was, but they didn't really know my work because
(05:32):
I had been kind of pulling all these different directions
to represent this or that for other people, and I
had to take a step back from I'm going to
be like, you know, I have a very clear vision
about what my offering was in the work to in
sexual violence. And that's why I started the organization, which
I actually never thought I would. I didn't want to
start another nonprofit and like, there's the world in another nonprofit,
(05:53):
but I thought it was really important to create a
container for the for the work to happen in and
so I I'm so glad I did that, and I'm really,
really proud of how we have been reclaiming for the
last two or three years. Right, it's just been constant work.
But we have great things happening Survivor Summer, me too,
(06:14):
voter and all this other stuff. We're still working up
against this mainstream narrative of what need too is. And
so the first thing that people should think of when
they hear the words me too is about the people
who actually said it, right, the people who are using
that phrase to identify as a part of this larger group.
We should not automatically think about a headline about Hollywood
(06:35):
about perpetrators. We should think about the human beings whose
lives have been adversely affected by this these traumatic experiences,
and that that's our goal to shift the narrative so
that me too is synonymous with survivors and the empathy
that is inherent in me too. Write absolutely, what's so
exciting for me about me too? It is just as afraid.
It's like I'm not alone, You're not alone. We can
(06:57):
be in community healing, and that healing space, that empathic space,
is what we need in the world right now. And
exactly the fact that we can't that that's been co
opted and corrupted speaks, I think to our inability to
sit in the uncomfortability and the vulnerability of what is
required to really be empathetic. That's right. The original intent
(07:19):
is still intact, and the work we're joined with survivors
on the ground in coalition with other organizations. It's very
much true to that. But as long as the mainstream
narrative is like who's next, and you know, who got
me too? To that kind of thing, it will still
have the same issues that we have around backlash and
around people understand misunderstanding. And that's harder, right, that's much harder.
(07:41):
That's like breaking into Hollywood. That's like getting in writer's
rooms and getting mainstream media too to adjust the way
they talk and think about us as survivors um but
also us meaning black women, and us meaning like all
kinds of us. Is that they don't think about when
they talk with this work. What is so beautiful about
(08:04):
the founding of Me Too is that it started with
centering the lived experiences of black and brown girls in Alabama,
some of the folks who were most marginalized with with
sexual assault, but in all aspects of society, and so
much of the narratives always wants to sort of focus
on the perpetrators and how their lives are being sort
of ruined, or the due process questions. And what I
(08:26):
got excited about when me Too went viral was that
I was like, oh, we can, maybe we can finally
have a conversation about what consent looks like. I think
a lot of men, specifically and potential perpetrators are real confused.
Remember years ago, I had read an article on the
good Man Project and a guy had written about basically
how he had assaulted this woman and realized after the
(08:49):
fact and like he fled the city. But he talked
about all the sort of conflicting messages that he had
gone from the media, all of around no meaning yes,
and like us needing to have a conversation around And
I was like, oh my god. People don't always understand
that they have not consented. I recently had the opportunity
to confront a man who had basically sexually assaulted me
too about thirteen years ago, and he it was really difficult, conversations,
(09:14):
really painful, and he didn't realize in that moment that
he had sexually assaulted me and the night had stayed
with him. We hadn't talked about this and we kind
of stayed friends afterwards, which is interesting and deep and
whatever happens all the time, just you know, peripheral friends.
But we never dated after that. And what was interesting
for me is that that night's day with me, you know,
(09:35):
till this day in its day with him as well,
because up until that point, and this is about two
thousand nine or so, he had been dating trans women
since the nineties and non trans women as well, and
he had never been turned down before. He had never
had someone stop a sexual encount and be like, wait, wait,
hold on, whoa you know that it never happened to him.
(09:55):
And I don't want to make this about perpetrators, but
it's like, if we really are serious, it's about ending
rape culture, ending sexual assault. We have to have conversations
about what consent looks like, and we have to be
able to create space. We have to have them early,
and we have to have them early. This is a
good time to take a little break. We'll be right
(10:16):
back though. Okay, that's taken care of. Let's get back
to our chat. I love that you always talk about
ending sexual assault, right and ending a culture of a
sexual assaulty, what is your vision for this. So I think,
(10:39):
you know, I always use this comparison, um, but I
talk about cigarettes and how you know, twenty thirty years ago,
we smoked cigarettes everywhere, and they smoked cigarettes on planes
and in schools and you know, in bars, whatever. And
then we had this onslaught of interventions. We had sort
(11:01):
of research and medical interventions that said secondhand smoke will
kill you. And people said, oh, well, you can't smoke
in a car, and you can't smoke in the house
with your children and your loved ones. Right, because this
research shows that. We had grassroots campaigns that came out
telling the truth about big tobacco and exposing them. We
had media interventions where we stopped seeing people smoking cigarettes,
(11:21):
and TV shows and movies and things like that. We
had legal interventions where big tobacco was sued by certain
you know, different entities. What happened. I think of that as,
you know, loosely a model for what has to happen
for us to be working towards ending sexual bodes. Now,
of course people still smoke, right, that's not It hasn't
ended smoking. But that also wasn't the goal. It was
(11:43):
to make sure people are knowledgeable about it. If we
don't have multiple interventions, multiple visions, right for a plan
that is working towards interrupting and eventually ending sexual violence,
we won't get there. And so I feel like we
need the same level. We need research about how sexual
violence impacts the economy, how it impacts the workforce, how
(12:06):
it impacts communities and cultures, and we need that information
disaggregated by race, by age, by gender, by all of
these different stuff so we really understand the scope of
the problem. It's huge. It's a huge problem. That's research.
We certainly need changes in these laws and policies that
are just woefully inadequate, right, and also things like even
(12:28):
vow which is which has been around for a long
time to violence against women, has all kind of flaws
in it. If there's a there's a push to this
country towards transformative justice or restorative justice or different right,
something different than a Carcero solution, if that's really the
direction we're heading in, then we need to start imagining
and implementing what that looks like now, which means that
(12:49):
we can create systems of transformative justice in our communities
and our institutions that can be replicated. But Essentially, the
vision is that people have to get active on all fronts.
We need narrative intervention. It's not really about policing sexuality
or censoring, but we don't need egregious sexual violence on television. Right,
(13:11):
And if you are using it to make a point
or statement about sexual violence, I think there's some space
for it. But we do need to be more vigilant
and conscious about the ways we show rape culture and
sexual violence portrayed in our mainstream media. So the vision
I have is to work in tandem with other people
in the field to create those interventions. And part of
(13:33):
what we're doing, you know, we have act to this
this new platform that we introduced last year that's really
to activate everyday people. Right. So it's such a huge
problem that it's no way that it can be tackled
without shifting the consciousness of everyday people to think, I
need to do something about this, right, I need to
be involved. We things like comprehensive sex education. Talking to
(13:56):
your point about consent, What would the world look like
if you take a group of kindergarten students right now
and you give them comprehensive sex education that covers the
spectrum right every year and layer it on and and
and and advance it every year so it's you know,
relevant to their age, and not just introduce consent in
(14:18):
tenth grade or in twelfth grade and then send these
kids off the college after watching a video on the
computer that says no means no and dotat. It's just
it's just, honestly, it's just not enough. It is it's outsized,
and it's not enough happening to match the magnitude of
the problem. And so I just I feel like I
have to keep ringing the alarm, and the work that
(14:39):
we do has to keep building coalition across the field.
Because I do think definitely with with giving all kinds
of praise and flowers to the work that's happened on
the ground around sexual violence, I do think there's a
way that some of the big national organizations got really complacent.
(15:02):
You know, think about when me Too first went viral.
There was no immediate response. There's no rapper response from philanthropy,
there was no rapper response from from big mainstream organizations. No,
so many people were used to not talking about it
and not having like a national sustained dialogue. Yeah, that's
(15:22):
really important, But I but I but it's just so.
I mean, there's so many things I think about and
want to talk about, but I but when I do
the deep dive into your work, love and empathy or
at the center, and what feels so beautiful is how
there's space created it through me too. There's space created
through empathy because I hear all the solutions you talk
about it and just like we can't even get fifteen
(15:44):
dollar minimum wage. They just read an article about like
the Secretary of Education I think in New York City
just stepped down and he was trying to desegregate schools
in New York and it couldn't get done. And it's
there's so much bureaucracy, there's so much corruption in this
system that keeps things from getting done. And I think
about how much we are not moving in that space
(16:04):
of love and empathy, that people in power are so
committed to maintaining that power that they used the divide
and conquered. Because I was thinking. Another thing that's come
up a lot recently that you've talked about publicly is
how me too is being framed a lot in the
black community is like an attack on black men. Right.
Oh gosh, yes, I think immediately. This is exactly how
(16:26):
divide and conquered works, right. Let's pit the interest of
black men against those of survivors of sexual assault and
create this narrative where like black men are being persecuted,
which then again erases the voices of survivors racists, like
the voices and experiences of black women and girls. We
can't hold two truths at the same time, and they
(16:46):
are multiple truths actually, when it comes to sexual violence
in the black community. We announced our campaign called We
as Ourselves. It's a collaboration with Times UP and the
National Women's Lost Center, and it really is a campaign
that's been a year in the making about centering black survivors.
And it came on the heels of the backlash of
the Russell Simmons documentary, the r. Kelly documentary, um Gail King,
(17:09):
backlash after Kobe Bryant, Like all of these things compounded.
It was like, why are black women always trashed in
the media when they come forward? You know, It's just
like we need to say something to be really specific,
So we put it up. It is no names involved.
We don't name any perpetrators, we don't even name any survivors.
We literally just say black survivors, not black women. You know,
(17:32):
it's like it's like all black survivors. And the amount
of trolling that has hit my page and me to
his page, it's always what about? What about? What about? Right?
And it's all these black men saying, oh, you hate
black men. We know the white women in Hollywood have
stolen your movement and they use you as a puppet,
And I'm just like, are you all insane? These are
(17:55):
the same people who would not stand up for those
black women survivors when they came forward. So it's it's
so frustrating for me because this should be a moment
for the black community to come together and say I
don't care what you look like, I don't care how
you identify. We will not accept this kind of violence
in our community against anybody. But instead, to your point,
(18:17):
it has become a moment of divide and conquer. It
is absolutely true, and I've said this three hundred thousand
times that sexual violence has been weaponized against black men.
We have a whole history of it that you can't deny,
and it's a painful history. We will never forget Emmetti,
and you can you can bring it from Emmette all
the way up to Brian Banks. Right, and I was
(18:37):
reading the story of the man in Boston who claimed
that his wife had been murdered by black man, and
he actually was the murderer, and they had lockdown Boston
searching for this black man. We know the painful history
of black men in law enforcement and black men being
falsely accused, mostly by white women mostly, right, That is
(19:00):
the truth that we do. Nobody's trying to ignore that
or erase it. What actually gets a raised is that
we focus on that conversation and we don't focus on
the sexual violences weaponis against black women too. We were enslaved,
and and sexual violence was used as a weapon of
torture for us during enslavement, right and and and black
women have had to deal with sexual violence at the
(19:23):
hands of white men, and we've had to deal with
sexual violence at the hands of our own men. There's
no way that we would have the second highest rate
of sexual violence experiences in this country behind indigenous women
if that weren't true. It doesn't say anything particular about
black men, but it creates this complicated conversation because oh, no,
(19:44):
we're not rapists. No, all black men are not rapists obviously, right, No,
you're not. But do black women get raped? Absolutely? Does
it happen at the hands of white men absolutely? Does
it also happen in the hands of black men. Absolutely,
So that at all this truth is out on the
table with love and empathy and compassion, we should be
(20:06):
able to close the curtain and say, yeah, we gotta
have a conversation about this. I think part of what
what the difficulty is for our community when I say
our community, I say black folks, is that when somebody
black does something, then it becomes a reflection of all
black people because of how white supremacy works the whole
community exactly, and when a white man does something, it
does not become a reflection of all white men. So
(20:28):
I think that we have to again, we have to
we have different kind of conversations in the media, and
it needs to be more nuanced. But I also think
about my friend A Lok who I had on the podcast.
We had a conversation a year ago in a look
said in that conversation, some people are not looking for justice.
I think they're looking for privilege. Yes, indeed, And I
feel like, what right, that's a word? What I field
(20:50):
is having grown up in the black church in Alabama,
is that there was such desire I think for some
black folks to have privilege, but in ways that replicate patriarchy.
There's so many, you know, incredible black women who have
been challenging patriarchy since the beginning, right, and who've been
intersectional and amazing. And there are some Black women who
(21:12):
are very interested and invested in patriarchy in a way
that elevates their life exactly, that elevates their particular life
and the life of their particular crowd. I mean, we
know that happens in our community without question. We were
socialized in patriarchy and white supremacy. It's the only model
we have for what power looks like, right, and we
are a community that's constantly having our power taken away
(21:35):
from us or attempts at power taken away from us.
Power is equated to money and wealth and and you know,
education in all these different ways that we have less
than in the community. So absolutely, that is a word.
They're not looking for justice, they're looking for privilege. But
I mean, this is the thing. When I'm hearing this,
like what about white men, I'm like, what about white men?
(21:56):
This is something that's really interesting to me. The reality
of the me too movement hashtag me too is that
it took a swath of white men down right. The
names that you hear associated is our folks weren't paying
attention because it weren't us. So who cares about a
Harvey Wantstein or Charlie Rose and you know whatever. But
this is a list of the New York Times put
(22:16):
out once and it's probably should be updated by now,
but maybe or nineteen of like four hundred men who
have been affected by me too. I went through that
list painstaking me. I can only find nineteen people of color.
Of those people of color, like six of them were
black men. So this as a as a thing in
(22:37):
the world, This is not something that has adversely affected
our community. Nobody is painting black men as the face
of me too. You got r Kelly, you got Russell Simmons,
you got Bill Cosby. Those are the three names of
black men that are most associated with sexual violence and
definitely not representative of the average black man. So this
(22:59):
this kind of this kind of notion that you want
to take down black men, and it's just it's nonsense,
and it's it's from a place of a lot of things.
I think a paranoia, I think triggering around the history
of sexual violence. But I also think, to your friend's point,
beyond the not wanting justice and wanting privilege, it is
a part of an ongoing history that also includes not
(23:22):
protecting black women, not standing up for black women, right,
and when black women stand up for themselves, finding ways
to knock us down. That's just happened. That's just true.
And and the black women who have been standing up
for black men, how about that? Yes, absolutely, And so
many black women who don't come forward because they don't
want to have another black man in the criminal justice system,
(23:44):
And so in the space of the healing that we
might need is subjugated to someone else. And so, gosh,
there's so much you want to talk to you about.
Now feels like a great time for a short right,
we'll be right back then. Okay, we're back. You are
(24:08):
at the editor of the forthcoming book with Burnee Brown.
Can you tell us the title of that book? That book,
as you know, because you're one of our contributors, is
called You Are Your Best Thing, And it's based on
a quote from Tony Morrison's book Beloved and I'm just
I'm so excited about it. I am so grateful that
(24:28):
you contributed to it. I really am, because you know,
Brnee and I became fast friends when we met some
years ago and and have had this you know, ongoing
conversation and relationship because of the ways that our work overlapsed.
And I was so frustrated, quite frankly last summer after
(24:49):
George Floyd was murdered, because I just kept hearing all
of these conversations about how white people can be better,
how about anti racism, about all of these things that
are necessary, but also not enough conversation about the trauma
that black people were holding by watching yet another member
of our community be murdered in the street by people
(25:10):
who are charged with protecting our lives, supposedly right to
know that another Brianna Taylor person would be murdered with
impunity like it just the number, I mean, there's more
than the ones that were public, but even the big
public ones where you have the videos that are played online,
that is traumatic. When you spoke about this last year,
it hit me and this is one of the moments
(25:32):
that when I was preparing for this, why I just
started broke down in tears because I was just like,
these are the words that I need, because I knew
that I was traumatized. I know, I knew that there's
collector trauma around this, but I just after George Floyd
and Tony McDade happened a few days after George Floyd
that's not on video, but then a trans woman with beating,
brutally beating Ayana do your and I just hit a
(25:52):
point where I just too much. I can't, I can't anymore,
I can't read details. This is so traumatizing, and I
love that this book with Renee is sort of a
response to that. Response to that. In the intro, you say,
our humanity, our individual and collective vulnerability, needs and deserves
some breathing realm. Yes, can you talk a little bit
(26:14):
more about the intention of the book. Absolutely, the intention
was to create a space for black people to talk
about how this impacts us. Right. Shame is a tool
of oppression, absolutely, I I and a tool of white supremacy.
I love Renee's work, obviously, and that helped me so much,
and I also found myself contorting to fit into it
(26:36):
in some ways because it didn't fully reflect my experience
as a black woman in this country, and so it
felt like I wanted a space for us to talk
about how shame impacts our lives and how we're resilient
to that shame right in various ways. And also I'm
a black woman. We need to hear the voices of
black transfolks about black weear folks about from black men,
(26:57):
from black young people, black elders. Our lives deserved space
to tell our stories and to just tell our stories,
not in relation to anything else, and not in service
of making white people better. Right. But I do think,
and I said this in the introduction, this is a
precursor to your anti racist work because you have to
(27:20):
be able to engage with black humanity in order to
not be racist. I really believe that if you're just I.
I read the anti racist book, and I do the
anti racist data data out, but you really don't engage
with black humanity, you don't try to understand it, or
think about it, or or have a connection to how
these things actually impact our lives, then your work will
(27:40):
be not as useful, not to you or to anybody else.
So this is an offering, you know, Burnee and I
labeled this and call and talk about this as an
offering first and for almost to the black community, you know,
a place to see ourselves and to see some of
our stories reflected, right, but also an offering to the
world to continue to tell stories and to normalize telling
(28:02):
these stories. Because there's also a piece that's like black
people don't talk about this either. You know. It's also
a little piece because that my piece is about health
and illness and how you know, so many black women
just hold it and don't talk about it and just
soldier through. So there's also an internal conversation for us
to have about some of this stuff too, so so beautiful,
so necessary. Um. In the intro, you say, we often
(28:25):
carry our trauma in similar ways, but the roads that
lead us to the trauma are also different. We must
pay attention to that road. The road, it's our humanity.
The road is the piece that we're talking about. A
lot of times we're happy and relieved to find similarities.
Oh YouTube you to me too, No fun intended. These
(28:46):
experiences create community and it's wonderful, but it is still
critical to understand the different paths that led you to
the trauma. Bernathan replies, that makes so much sense. We
have to know the road if we're going to walk
back down, own it and dismantle the systems that lead
us to trauma. So knowing the road, knowing the road,
(29:07):
and and Brneble talks about owning the story too, and
her work over and over again that she's applied to us,
owning our history. And I love I love that you
connect so much to Burnet's work. I do as well.
And I think in the intro you also talked about vulnerability,
that the vulnerability piece was really hard for you, and
I was just like, oh, and and when you are
a trauma survivor or vulnerability is really difficult. Yeah, yeah,
(29:32):
And it's it's it's triggering. It's like I'm gonna die
if the sensation in our bodies is like I'm gonna die,
I'm not going to survive this if I'm vulnerable. When
you've experienced trauma, and so many black people have experienced trauma,
and vulnerability means something different to us, right to black people,
I think I think there's a there's a different connotation.
It's not just you know, I don't want to trivialize
(29:52):
anybody's experience with with vulnerability, but for us, it can
sometimes mean death. Right, It can mean a a kind
of danger that other people don't experience outside of our community.
So it is it is you tell me to be
vulnerable to who for what? No, no right? You have
to give me more explanation than that. Yeah, But vulnerability
(30:13):
is also the site of all the things that are
dear and wonderful and incredible in our lives. So we
have to be able to create the safe spaces and
we still need it. Yeah, we still need we have
to create the safe spaces so we can be vulnerable exactly.
I also think that in this moment that we have
so much to learn from survivors and survival and the
ideas of empowermental empathy, and healing. We have been traumatized
(30:36):
as a country, right, we have been traumatized as a world, really,
but this country has been through a grossly traumatic experience.
One of the things I've been talking about lately is
that I don't want to do any liberation work that
doesn't have a politic of grace included. We need more love,
We need more space for each other, because particularly those
who are working towards the same things, who have a
(30:58):
liberation ideology g and who are thinking towards being more
free in this world and having a more just world.
We definitely need to have more grace for each other.
It's not a competition. We need to be working more
in tandem, but certainly without empathy and love and some vulnerability,
we won't get there. I love it. I love it.
I love it. Thank you for that. So I like
(31:22):
to end the podcast with a question, and the question
is what else is true? And it's about really what
helps you get through? And it's resetting our nervous system.
So what are the things or the one thing or
the thought or the sensation that helps you get through?
A resource for you in your life today? What else
is true for you? Toronto Burke? What else is true?
What else is true? Is that I am gentle, right
(31:47):
I am. I am not rough around the edges all
the time. I'm not, you know, badass all the time.
I am my own soft place to land sometimes and
then and I don't think I acknowledge that enough. I
don't know if that's what you mean and when you're
asking that question, but that's what came to my mind first,
(32:08):
as on my own resource sometimes is that what helps
you get through? Sometimes? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, Sometimes being my
own resource. It is, it is, certainly its supposed to
be on my mind lately. I just feel like, you know,
as black women, we always are kind of made to
feel like you have to be hard as bricks and
you know, sharp edges, and I'm like, na, that's not
(32:30):
really who I am all the time, I'm not and
I don't want to be. And so I try to
be my own, create my own gentleness for myself because
people won't give it to you. I love that so much.
So can you just tell people where to find you?
Tell them your website. Absolutely, get to know more about Toronto. Well,
(32:54):
I think I'm just Toronto Burke on Everything or maybe
Toronto Janine on Instagram. And of course me to movement,
please go to ours. It's me to envy empty dot org.
Our website has a ton of resources for survivors and
if you're not a survivor and you wanted to support survivors,
to support the movement, you should go there to visit
our active platform. We as ourselves that the campaign has launched,
(33:18):
so go check that out. The book You Are Your
Best Thing, and this fall my memoir will drop, so
stay tuned for that. Hopefully, I'll be back to talk
about it. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Thank you, Thank you for
the work, thank you for being a survivor. Thank you
for creating this space for empowerment through empathy. I freaking
love that. Thank you. Thank you, Leverd. I freaking love you.
(33:41):
You are so so, so, so so special. Thank you.
I love Toronto Brook so much. What hits me in
my gut after listening to our conversation is the difficulty
and wrapping words around the vulnerability required to heal, especially
(34:03):
for those of us who are survivors of sexual assault.
If you're a trauma survivor, vulnerability can feel like death.
And if you're a black, a woman, trans a person
with a disability, or at the intersection of a few
or all of these experiences and more, trauma could be
a huge component of your story. But allowing ourselves to
(34:26):
be vulnerable, I feel it's the only way we can
truly heal. Burnet Brown defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and
emotional exposure. I can testify that allowing myself to be vulnerable,
allowing myself to confront the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure
tied to my various traumas. Has often felt like I
(34:50):
was going to die, that I couldn't survive, the pain,
the shame just below the surface. But confronting those difficult
things did not kill me. I'm still here and more
revealing it from the process to Rono Burke's work and
the phrase me too as a reminder we are not alone.
(35:21):
Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. Please rate, review, subscribe,
and share with everyone you know. You can find me
on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook
at Laverne Cox for Real. Join me next week when
I talked to Kevin Allred, an award winning author, speaker,
and educator, about our mutual love and respect for the Queen,
(35:44):
the Diva herself, Queen be Sasha Fears, the One and
Only Beyonce, and how her music interrogates American race, gender
and sexual politics. Until next time, stay in the love.
The Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shondaland Audio
(36:05):
in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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