Women To Admire: Tarana Burke

Tarana Burke is a woman we admire because she is the true founder of the Me Too movement that has rocked every industry, from Hollywood to Publishing to Congress.

Ask any woman in your life if they’ve ever been sexually harassed, and I can almost guarantee that they have. 17,700,000 women and 2,780,000 men have reported sexual assault since 1998. RAINN estimates that 1 in 98 people have been sexually assaulted.

Those numbers became more humanized when last year, stories flooded social media along with the now immensely powerful hashtag: #MeToo. The movement may have been popularized by actress Alyssa Milano, but Tarana Burke has been doing the work, day in and day out, through the me too organization.

Her Twitter bio defines her as a “servant leader,” and that is the truest label that I could assign to her. Her movement began in 2006 and involves people from all walks of life, even the LGBTQ+ community and people of color that tend to get left out of mainstream feminist movements.

Time Magazine’s People of the Year honored members of the #MeToo movement in a move that Burke called bittersweet.

“We need a complete cultural transformation if we are to eradicate sexual assault in our lifetimes,” Burke wrote in a statement to Time. “It means we must build our families differently, engage our communities and confront some of our long-held assumptions about ourselves. Today’s announcement is an opportunity for all of us to take a hard look at ourselves and answer the question:

When you hear #MeToo, will you stand up and say #NoMore?

Let’s get to work.”

Tarana Burke attended the Golden Globes as Michelle Williams’ plus one as part of the Time’s Up movement launched by Hollywood stars to ensure the conversation continued during awards season.

Tarana Burke is one of the women we admire because she keeps herself on the ground, doing the work for all survivors of sexual assault day after day. She is the kind of activist that we should all aspire to be like.

Burke’s book, Where the Light Enters, will be available in early 2019, according to The Daily Mail. The memoir will be co-written with Asha Bandele.

Burke’s book, Where the Light Enters, will be available in early 2019, according to The Daily Mail. The memoir will be co-written with Asha Bandele.

Editor’s Note: Every day in March, we here at Culturess will feature a Woman to Admire — both real and fictional — for Women’s History Month. Keep coming back every day to see who’s made it on the list.