Book review | With Unbound, #MeToo founder Tarana Burke explains why she felt the need to reclaim the movement

If you are familiar with the #MeToo movement but have not heard of Tarana Burke, you are not the only one. The mistaken view that it was started by actors, stand-up comics, and journalists has obscured, for many Indians, the history of this movement.

It is the brainchild of a Black American activist named Tarana Burke, who has been working “at the intersection of racial justice, arts and culture, anti-violence, and gender equity” for nearly three decades.

Her memoir Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021), published by Flatiron Books, will introduce you to the genesis of the movement. When Burke first saw #MeToo being used all over social media to talk about experiences of sexual assault, she wondered why she was not consulted. After all, she had been “doing the work of bringing empathy into the fight against sexual violence for many years now, using this language.”  

Why was she so invested in owning this work? What made her feel threatened and insecure? Are movements not supposed to focus on the collective rather than the individual? If these thoughts are flooding your mind, it might be helpful to think about Black people’s, especially Black women’s, experiences of not being given due credit for their labour and creativity in a white supremacist society that considers them unworthy, and also dehumanises them.

It was jarring for Burke to see “me too,” the phrase that she had built her work and purpose around, being used by “people outside of that community.”

When #MeToo went viral, this is how she felt: “Y’all know if these white women start using this hashtag, and it gets popular, they will never believe that a Black woman in her 40s from the Bronx has been building a movement for the same purposes, using those exact words, for years now.

It will be over.”

Bronx is a borough of New York City, and her identity as “a third-generation Bronxite” is important for Burke. She was born and raised there in the 1970s, so the Bronx is “almost like another family member.” It gave her a cultural and political education. She writes, “It is true that there were very few resources in the hood, but it was the first place I learned the value of using what you have to create what you need. People struggled but they also built.”

In New York City – like many other cities of the world – your address plays a big role in determining the kind of opportunities that you get. People size you up based on where you live, the mode of transport that you use, where you shop, and who you socialise with. They may have never stepped into the neighbourhoods that they have opinions about but that does not stop them from cooking up stories and theories about the people who grew up there.

Burke challenges stereotypical depictions of the Bronx in popular culture and art exhibits that tend to emphasise “burned-out buildings, and poverty-stricken Black and Latinx youth.” She is extremely proud of her borough; its “Black Power ethos” shaped her upbringing. She feels nourished by her African heritage. She writes, “When I think of my own journey to healing, so much of it mirrors the power, resilience, and tenacity of my family and my borough.”

At the same, this was also a place that brought her immense pain. She was raped at the age of seven. In high school, when girls teased her about being a virgin, she used to think, “If only they knew I lost my virginity at seven.” She carried the pain and the shame well into adulthood. It took her a long time to stop blaming herself for what had happened, to wean herself away from thinking that she deserved “to be tormented” for breaking the rules.  

Burke’s memoir has answers for people who ask rape victims/survivors why they chose not to report the violence soon after the incident. When she was a child, she often heard adults say things like, “You know he likes to ‘mess with’ little girls” or “You know you can’t trust him around no kids,” but she had no idea of what this meant. These euphemisms did not protect her from reality; they prevented her from gaining the knowledge that she needed.  

She writes, “The older women in my life — whether it was my mother or my aunt or the women in my building, who looked at me as their sweet baby — taught me plenty about protecting myself and my private parts. Never let anyone touch your private parts, they’d say. But I wasn’t told why I had to protect my private parts, just that it was imperative that I did.”

As a result of this, when she was raped, she did not hold her abusers accountable. She held herself to blame because she believed that she had broken the rules. She had been taught not to go anywhere without permission, and never to be out of sight of an adult when she was playing. She had been strictly instructed to stay away from grown-up boys. When she was assaulted, she thought she was being punished because she had not been “a good girl.”

The absence of open conversation about bodily autonomy withheld from her the language that she could have used to make sense of her experience, and to seek help from adults. She writes, “I didn’t know what ejaculation was, so for years, I thought that he was peeing on me — like the way dogs peed on fire hydrants or random piles of garbage.” This book will hopefully serve as a wake-up call for parents, who are opposed to sexuality education.  

How did Burke find the courage to lead a movement that would help other Black girls and women heal from the culture of shame and silence around sexual violence? Who were her mentors? What did she learn from her college education, relationships with men, and community organising? To what extent did her faith as a Catholic support her through various ups and downs? The book ventures into all of these areas with remarkable honesty.

Burke writes about the times that she failed to be the kind of role model that she wished to be. She acknowledges errors of judgment with respect to people that she once lionised. She also opens up about not being able to protect her own child from sexual abuse despite all that she has done until now to combat sexual violence. Such vulnerability is rare in a world where even people engaged in social justice work are acutely conscious of the image they project.  

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist, and book reviewer.