 Good evening. Thank you very much for being with us tonight. This is another, you know, series of presidential distinguished speaker talks. We've been doing this for a number of years, but the last couple of years we've tried to do it in the context of an annual theme. Last year was in search of refuge, looking at the refugee crisis. And this year it has been talking about race, gender, and power. And we couldn't have picked a more exciting year to get involved in that topic. It's just been no shortage of things to discuss. And part of the objective of being at a university is to make sure that we are on the front lines of those conversations. So for those of you from the campus proper and from the local community and from parts of Rhode Island farther afield, welcome tonight. I think we're going to have a great evening tonight. These talks are put together by various people. And tonight one of the individuals who's been quite involved in this evening's speaker, in arranging for her to be here, was Laura de Amour who's an associate professor in American Studies. And so I'm going to invite Laura up on stage to introduce her speaker. So Laura de Amour. Hi everybody, I am Laura de Amour. It's wonderful to see you all here tonight. We try to make it look easy when we bring a speaker as inspirational as Tarana Burke to campus. But the reality is that this event has been in the works for many months. So as President Ferrer said, we are talking about race, gender and power this year. And a story like Tarana Burke's is essential to that discourse because at a core, at its core, it's a story about the ways that race and gender intersect in ways that disempower victims. But through this movement, Me Too promotes empowerment through empathy, creating a global community of people who are connected to a journey of healing. And that is powerful. Before I call out tonight's guest, I want to thank all the sponsoring departments and offices who helped make tonight's event a reality. The way that grassroots activist movements really catch on is to work from the bottom up. And tonight's event is emblematic of that in so many ways. Not just in the story of the Me Too movement, but also in the solidarity of the people here at Roger Williams University who believed this was a moment that we all needed to share together and did the work to get you all into the room. So to that end, I want to say thank you to the Intercultural Center, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Politics and International Relations, English and Creative Writing, Psychology, Communications and Media Studies, Public Health, the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Justice Studies, the Gebelli School of Business, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Title IX Office and the President's Office. And I know there are many, many other departments out there who sent emails and made announcements and shared social media in order to get your attendance, so I thank them all as well. Thanks to Heidi Dagwon and her staff in special events and all the folks who are helping with lights and sound and video recording and set up and breakdown, catering, making the promo materials, tweeting and Facebooking and engaging with our local community. Thank you to the professors who have brought students and student life folks who have included this in their programming, student leaders for bringing their peers and students for showing up to demonstrate that by their presence this is an important night. Showing up is critical part of activist work. Thank you to family members, members of the community, community partners, community organizations and schools. Thank you for coming. There is a group of sixth graders and their teachers here from Sophia Academy in Providence. Right? They're learning about Tarana Burke and the Me Too movement in their social studies and language arts classes. And they're out on a school night for the opportunity to see this amazing activist on stage. Thank you. You may have noticed this projector over here with a web link posted on it. Tonight's event is going to have a moderated Q&A session. And if you have a question that you would like to ask Tarana Burke, anytime between now and the end of the evening, you can visit that web link on any internet-enabled device and type in your question and submit it. And we'll select our questions here from those that are submitted by you. The Q&A, by the way, will be moderated by Roger Williams University's own Associate Director of the Intercultural Center, Dr. Mina Chung. Indeed, who will join Tarana on stage in just a short time. Now, as you're all aware, the simple yet courageous Me Too hashtag campaign has emerged as a rallying cry for people everywhere who have survived sexual assaults and sexual harassment. And Tarana Burke's powerful poignant story as the creator of what is now an international movement that supports survivors will move uplift and inspire you. Now a Senior Director of Programs at Girls for Gender Equity, Tarana has dedicated more than 25 years of her life to social justice and to laying the groundwork for a movement that was initially created to help young women of color who survived sexual abuse and assault. Tonight, she'll provide words of empowerment, she'll lift up marginalized voices, she'll enable survivors all across all races, genders, and classes to know that they're not alone and create a space for comfort and healing to those who've experienced trauma. Please welcome to the stage, Tarana Burke. All right. Hello, Roger Williams and company. I'm assuming everybody's not from Roger Williams here, right? Okay, that's cool. We like friends. So I start off all of my conversations like this by saying that I don't make speeches. And by that, I mean that I have a bad memory and I can't remember lines and I get nervous. And so what I do instead is create some talking points and then we'll have a little conversation. I mean, it's going to be a little one-sided. But then we'll get to the questions. So, and I also want to start off by saying we are Alondra and Karina. Stand up for a second. Oh, Karina's night. Is that Alondra? Hey, Puddin, how are you? Hey. I'm going to come to your school tomorrow, okay? Okay. Thank you for your letter. Okay. Now that we got that out the way. So really, the reason why I have these conversations and why I'm traveling around speaking at schools and in communities is because there's a lot of information out in the world about the Me Too movement. A lot of it is wrong. A lot of it is crafted by the media and on social media and urban legend at this point. One of them being that I'm from Queens. Let's clear that up right away. I'm from the Bronx, New York. Okay. Let the record show. The media is, but I like to talk to people so you hear firsthand about how this movement started, how this work began, the meaning of it, what it's grounded in, and where we're going from here. I am from the Bronx, and I'm from a very, what we, what people like to call left-leaning family. I had a grandfather who considered himself a Garveyite, which is a follower of Marcus Garvey. I know who Marcus Garvey is. And a mom who was pan-Africanist and black nationalist. And so I grew up in a home that was very steeped in both historical and cultural history of black people. It was very important to my family. It was very important to my upbringing. But I didn't have a grounding in how to take that knowledge, that history and culture that was so rich in our family and use it in the community to do something to further rights for black people, right? To look for justice, to seek justice, to work in service of my community. I just had all of this information, actually probably too young. When I was about 14 years old, though, this organization found me. It's called the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. It was based in Selma, Alabama, but it was national. And they went looking around the country for youth organizations or young people who they could recruit. It was founded by veterans of the civil rights and human rights and black power and labor movements, mostly from the South. And these elders, my elders, got together and said that they wanted to make sure that the next generation of young people coming up had a foundation that could carry on the work that they started. So they created the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. They found me when I was about 14, and the purpose of 21st Century really is to create grassroots community leaders. And lo and behold, and the way that they did it was really hands-on. Kind of, we got information and then we implemented it right away. And so in 1989, the very first thing that I organized around, the very first person I organized against was, guess who? Donald Trump. That's true. In 1989, there was a case called the Central Park Jogger Case that many of you might have heard of now. There's a documentary about it, and it's been in the news. They sued New York City. But it was a fresh case in 1989. And it was a case where these young men from the Brompton Harlem were accused of sexually assaulting a woman, a white woman, these were black and Latino boys, sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park. And what Donald Trump did was take out full-page ads in all of the New York City newspapers. All of the boys were under 18, and he put all of their pictures in the ads. And he basically put a bounty on their head, called for them to have the death penalty, said that they were animals, said that they were wilding, running through Central Park, really doubling down on this stereotype of the black man who was running around trying to rape white women and this long-standing stereotype that's been held in our community. And so, as a young person, one, I was sort of connected to them because I knew Yusef Salam, one of the brothers who was accused. I had, he was in a relationship with a friend of mine. But two, we knew that not to be true. And so, this, our organizing was about representation and about how these young black men were being represented in the media. And we held a rally and we went down to the daily newspaper and organized the rally in front of the newspaper and we went to City Hall. And it was all very exciting. And at the conclusion of our rally and all of the things we organized, it was the first time I thought, oh, I really like this. I like this feeling there. They let us lead everything. We decided what we wanted to do. We decided who we wanted to protest. We decided how we wanted to protest. And together, and the adults just gave us guidance wherever we needed, where adults had to fit themselves in. And so that spark was lit for me because we got a response, which was amazing, right? It was 14 years old. We got a little article about this big in a local paper called The Amsterdam News. This is an old black newspaper in New York. But I mean, it really could have been the front page of The New York Times as far as we were concerned. It was so exciting to just see your name in the newspaper in relation to something that was positive and in relation to something that we had organized and come up with. And so the spark was lit for me at that point, that this is something that I really was passionate about. And I stayed with 21st Century for the rest of my life. I stayed with 21st Century though in college. I went to Alabama for college and started at Alabama State University. Ended up transferring to a school called Auburn University. Are you familiar? Y'all watch football? Okay. Football is like religion in Alabama, so you start with the college and then you go right to the team. So I went to Auburn University, which was not really diverse. Actually, I don't even know if diversity was a topic at all on the campus. We were still dealing with things like one of the white fraternities, several of the white fraternities called Whistling Dixie, where they would recreate an antebellum parade and march down the street in antebellum clothes. And one year they even asked one of the black fraternities if they could play slaves to make it more authentic. Talk about campus culture. So in college I did a lot of organizing on campus around, again, issues of race. Issues of inequality, mostly about race. And at some point we had this really, as a matter of fact, it was about the Whistling Dixie Festival. We had this really big, actually no, it wasn't sorry, it was about zero tolerance on campus. We were fighting against this zero tolerance policy on campus because it was inherently racist. We were in the Montgomery campus and the predominant race of students on campus were people of color and all of a sudden the rules changed and it was zero tolerance on campus so you would get thrown off. And again, got a little bit of news press around it. And I talked to one of my elders about it and I was very proud of it and I showed her the press clip and I said look, we made the paper, we're making all of this progress and she said why do they call you a campus organizer? And I said because I live on a college campus and I organize. And she said, yeah, that's not a title. She said a college campus is like a Petri dish. She said this is where you get to try things and mess up and it's trial and error and you're figuring it out. She said, but what happens if you're a campus organizer, what happens when you leave campus? What happens when you finish school? I don't know. She said because you're an organizer, period. You don't need any qualifier for that. This is in your blood, this is what you want to do for the rest of your life and you need to claim that title. And I left school knowing that I was an organizer and this is exactly what I wanted to do and I wouldn't be anything else. And if I was anything else at my core, I would always be an organizer. And that came into very useful some years later. So I left school and I went to work for 21st century, the organization that had given me all this wonderful education. And we had summer camps, summer leadership camps where young people would come, I had gone since I was 14, young people would come every year for nine days and get this really intense education around organizing. And it had a lot of history and we talked about a lot of interpersonal relations. And every year we had a session called sister to sister and brother to brother. Of course this was 1996, so we had really no gender analysis at all. So sister to sister and brother to brother. And we would separate the boys and the girls and give the girls free reign to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And every year and I had participated in this even when I was young and I was always quiet and I listened to the stories and I didn't really contribute myself. This year we had a group of girls and inevitably every year what happens is that the girls ask about boys and relationships and they talk about conflicts between each other. Kind of junior high school, high school topics for girls. And then one girl will always turn the conversation to some form of sexual violence. It was guaranteed every year somebody would talk about what they had experienced or what they were experiencing. So we become accustomed to it, we had some things in place, we had counselors, we had numbers and we had protocols for when that happened. And particularly it was a new girl in the program. And some of you might have heard this story but this is sort of the backstory. It's a new girl in the program, I call her Heaven publicly. She was probably 12 or 13 years old. She was what I like to call my special. So if you work with kids, anybody here work with kids, you know there's always that one kid that is right here that follows you everywhere and wants to sit next to you, teachers know that she's my special. She followed me all over the place. And I allowed her to because she was always getting into trouble, number one. But it was that kind of trouble that made me recognize that there was something else happening there, that I needed to hold her close. And so at this particular sister to sister session she saw her body language, I saw that she was trying to contribute to the conversation but she couldn't quite get there. And so I had to talk to her. I had to talk to her. I had to talk to her. I had to talk to her. And we had a campsite. It was really difficult to navigate but she found me. And she said, Mr. Ron, I really want to talk to you. I really have to talk to you. I really want to, you know, I have to tell you something. And here's the interesting thing. I tell the story now, I'm 44. I realized that I was only 22 years old. I was very young. I was still trying to understand what being a survivor meant. As a matter of fact, I had never even used the word survivor to describe myself. I was still very much trying to unpack things that I had dealt with in my life. And so when this beautiful baby came to me, just bright-eyed and hopeful, asking me to listen to her and give her a moment so she could release this thing that she had been holding on to. And she was so brave. Because it takes a lot to let that out. She started telling me this story and I feel like I held my breath literally for the whole time. She starts giving me these accounts of things that are happening to her at the hands of her. Stepfather. And it was difficult. I just couldn't hold space for her. But we call holding space now. I didn't have that. My mind was racing. Literally every time I tell this story, I come back to this moment of standing in this corner with my mind racing, trying to think of something. Just a thing that I could say to one, make her feel better. And I had so much pressure on myself. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a social worker. I don't know what to say. I can't handle this. I don't want to do it wrong. I don't want to mess her up more. I don't, I don't, I don't. And so I put so much pressure on myself that I shut down. And at some point in the middle of her talk and I said, I can't hear this. Just go tell Ms. Malika, this other woman who you worked with, I said, please go talk to Ms. Malika. And this child who was confiding in me, who had found some solace in this adult who she thought understood her, walked away feeling broken, like she was broken. And I felt so bad, I can always see her little face. She's like 13, she had a little chubby brown face. And I just, I couldn't do anything about it. And when people ask me why, when we started this work, I called it me too, it's because of this child. Because what I realized was in that moment, at the very least, when she was pouring her heart out, the only thing I really wanted to say to her was me too. I really wanted her to know that I heard her and I believed her and I understood her and I connected to her. But I couldn't even get those two little words out, I was so paralyzed. That was 1996. And that's obviously stayed with me all of these years. And it stayed with me in a really powerful way. Here's an interesting thing though. Since all of this me too has gone viral and it's become so popular. And I've told this story more than once. I had another student contact, she's grown now, she's 34, but another one of my former students contacted me one day. And we talked fairly often and she said, I wish you would stop. I used to say that this was my biggest failure when I tell that story. And she said, I wish you would stop saying that that's your biggest failure. And I was like, but it is and I feel so bad and really early on I feel a little bit difficult. And she said, well, that's your biggest failure and I'm your biggest success. And she said, I wish you would think about me. Do you forget? I was 14 then too. Do you forget that she said you were the second person I told my story to but you were the first person to believe me. And she said, when you told me me too and you gave me that t-shirt you changed my life. And so I tell the story a little differently now because it's not a failure. It's not. It was a catalyst. And it led to something that was much bigger than I could have ever imagined. And so I got a little ahead of myself. Let me back up. And so I didn't start doing the work then. This was 96. But that story, that moment sat in my spirit for a long time. And so some years later probably around 2002-2003 I'm still, I'm living in Selma and I'm executive director of an organization. It's the Black Belt Arts and Cultural Center. And it was wonderful after-school program, cultural programming and whatnot. And my friend and I who ran the program used to talk all the time, you know, after work we would just be like there's something happening with these girls. Right? We couldn't put our finger on it quite but it was like we feel like these girls need not more but different kind of attention. Right? What could we craft for these girls that was just different? And we tried to do programming within our organization but it didn't work. Finally we came up with this very complicated, you know, when you're young, you have a lot of energy. We were very imaginative. We came up with this complicated 21-week Rites of Passage program. And it was very, it was called Jindai Azad. It's very African. It meant you are powerful, give thanks. Oh my god, the girls went through it. It was a combination of pledging and Rites of Passage and leadership development and it was super intense but it worked. The first year was so successful we had like 50 girls go through the program. So some teachers came to us and they asked us you know, can you replicate this for school? Could you bring this into the school? You can't, you gotta tone down the African a little bit. You gotta change up some things a little bit. 21 weeks. So, you know, we kind of conferred and put our heads together and again I was like it's not really the name. We can keep the African. We don't have to say that. We can keep these ideas. We don't have to say these things. It's not really the names. It's really the spirit of what we were trying to do. And what we were trying to do and it's funny we were talking about etiquette earlier tonight and I had dinner with the president. Thank you, it was lovely. We were talking about etiquette and it reminded me of this. There's so many programs that exist that are about teaching etiquette to girls. Right? And you have these programs for boys they're all about building power and building leaders and when you get to the girls programs it's about teaching them how to like become this thing so that the world accepts them. Let me teach you how to fold a napkin and use the right fork and sip out of the right cup so that the world can think that you're lovely. And you know, it's useful. Clearly I could have used that tonight. However, and that's the way that people talk about building self-esteem with girls. For us, particularly working with black and brown girls the idea of building self-esteem had to be steeped in something else. Because what we knew as adult women and having been girls is that I can tell you that you have all the magic in the world. I can call you beautiful and talented and worthy and lovely and you're gonna leave me and go out into a world that tells you something different every day. The movies don't tell you that the music doesn't tell you that the magazines don't tell you that you don't see it on social media there's nothing that grounds you in that reality. Those things that are true but there's nothing that grounds you in that reality. And so for us, it was about building a sense of self-worth and self-esteem would grow from that. The idea program just be because the idea was we really wanted girls to and particularly these black and brown girls to understand that they were worthy just for existing. You don't have to be the smartest or the fastest or the prettiest or the whatever. Everything is qualified for girls, right? Academically this and socially that and athletically this. We wanted you to know that you could just be queada who gets C sometimes and you are still worthy and you are still beautiful and you are still all of these magical things that people say you are just because you exist. And so we built that program. The thing that happened though is once we started that program we were working with girls every day and the stories came we were inundated with stories of sexual violence that these girls didn't even know what sexual violence. They didn't even know what to call it because they had become so normalized in their lives. I'll give you an example. I had a girl once come to me and say I'll give you two examples. I had a girl once who come to me and say she was late for the program and I was like why are you late? I'm fussing because that's what we do. We fuss. And I'm like why are you late? And she says oh Mr. because I was supposed to have detention and I'm saying this name because it's now out in the open. I went to see Dean Chestnut said she kept talking she was like well I got out of detention so I could come here because you know if you go see Dean Chestnut wearing your uniform he'll let you out of detention. She was a dance line member. You know that how schools have cheerleaders nails I have dance line. She was on a dance line and they wore these little skimpy little outfits on the field which was fine for their performance. But this Dean and it was known in the school if you went to the Dean's office and you wore your cheerleader outfit or your dance line outfit or your track outfit you can get out of detention. Now let me just say I am a consummate professional most of the time. But this right here knocked me off my square. When that child came and told me that I just put her in the back of my car and drove up to the school and demanded to see the principal right away. And the principal said to me and I told him the story and I was hot and I was like this has to stop and I need something done and you know I'm going on my rant and the first thing he said to me was this child's name I'll just say Suzy you know Suzy's been suspended three times this year I said what bearing does that have on this moment? He's like I'm just saying you know sometimes these kids and he went into all of these different reasons why this had to be bless you. Why this had to be not true I left and I organized some parents and some other concerned citizens and the story is too long but let me just say Dean Chestnut no longer works there and has not worked there for quite a while. But two things two things happen one I realized that we had work to do in our community because all of those years I had spent as an organizer and I had been building up my skill and my muscle around organizing in my community it had all been around issues of race sometimes issues of economic justice sometimes issues of you know political issues organizing for politicians I had never once organized around gender based violence around issues of gender at all and not only had I never organized around it nobody around me even talked about it I lived in a community where I was very active I was surrounded by activists and organizers all the time and we never talked about it these are activists and organizers who were also survivors never had a discussion about it it's the most taboo thing in the world it's tearing our community apart but we don't recognize it we didn't recognize it then just like we don't recognize it now it was tearing our community apart and we weren't doing anything about it out of one side of our mouth tearing our community down and standing up for the rights of the most vulnerable and out of the other side of our mouth we were watching the most vulnerable be used and manipulated and torn apart and traumatized and we weren't doing anything about it and so we took the idea of just be and decided we don't want to start another organization this will be our campaign we're gonna start a movement it takes a lot of audacity we're gonna start a movement but that audacity comes from anger and frustration and fed upness and that's what we felt and so I sat with my friend and I thought what can we do? how can we do this? we knew we needed to start with the group of girls we were working with and we started with the idea that one, I thought about what is it that I needed when I was a young survivor? what would have changed the trajectory of my life when I was a young survivor? and also, what do I have now? right? I started off looking for resources I went out into the community and I talked to I went to the rape crisis center y'all lord I'm sure that the rape crisis center I hope that it is very robust and it goes out into the community here and they're diverse and all of those things but my experience is that so many of them are not and a lot of that is because they're under-resourced to be quite honest it's not necessarily intentional people don't give money to rape crisis centers but the one in this community in particular I went to visit them a woman opened it first of all, they were situated physically next to the halfway house in the community so these men sat outside of the house all day in chairs and if you were there to visit the crisis center to walk past this group of men who are just always outside then when I got to the door I rang the bell woman comes to the door cracks it about that much says can I help you? okay it's 4.30, maybe she's closing soon I said yeah I'd like to get some resources I'm trying to get some assistance now she doesn't know whether I'm a survivor a teacher, you know anything about me she said we don't take walk-ins darling you need to go to the police station fill out a report they'll call us and we'll meet you there I said thank you and I left and I knew also at that moment that this is not something that's gonna work for our children it's not gonna work for adults I went home and I took the two things that I had one of them being experienced as a survivor the other one being Google Google was just popping off in about 2006 so it was very exciting and I did some research and I talked to my friend and I said you know what we need to start we need to start with language these girls didn't even have language to describe what have been happening to them they couldn't tell us and articulate that this they knew something was wrong but they didn't know how to frame it to express that to us it reminded me when my daughter I have a 20 year old daughter when my daughter was young maybe 3 or 4 years old they had a fever of like 100 and 300 really bad fever and when they asked me to explain what was going on I said oh you had a really bad fever that's why I had to take you to the hospital and for about a year really after that every time something happened I had to go get a scratch I have a fever in my toe mommy I have a fever on my elbow like everything became a fever but that's because they didn't have language to talk about the pain that they were experiencing they didn't know how to describe this thing that was happening and that's what we saw with these girls they didn't know how to describe it so we started with language but the other thing I knew right away was that I use my story as a jumping off point because these are kids who looked up to me and who trusted me but they also didn't just need to hear my story they needed to hear how I got passed they needed to hear what happened after my story and so we used pop culture because these were young people and we used stories from Gabrielle Union and Oprah Winfrey Mary J. Blige and Fantasia anybody who we can think of who would share the story around sexual violence and stories with them particularly Oprah because Oprah's Oprah and it became this North Star it can be problematic obviously putting celebrities on the pedestal but for these small black girls knowing that somebody like Oprah Winfrey had gone through this thing that they had gone through and then became Oprah Winfrey would turn on a light bulb in their eyes that we can't just do with words and that's how we started with no resources with very little money but with a lot of hope that we can start these girls on a healing journey that would change the trajectory of their lives and that's what Me Too is about it's about survivors and it's about healing regardless of what you hear in the media regardless of what you see that is the crux of what this work is about and it's also about interrupting sexual violence or sexual violence that story about that Dean I'll tell you a little bit about what happened I was so frustrated that I could not that I got that response from the principal that my child wasn't in high school so I went and found some parents who were in high school some of the parents of our other girls and I got some of the community women who I did work with and I told them what happened and I told them this story and they were horrified and so I asked them and we talked about what we can do and I said let's talk to the girls let's talk to the kids we work with because the worst thing you can do is get in the room and try to solve problems for people who are not in the room so we brought some of the girls in and we put our heads together and we staged our own low protest in action we had the girls come to school dressed in their uniforms the whole cheerleading squad the whole dance line some kind of uniform most of them come dressed in their uniforms and then we got to lunch that day the girls got to lunch that day we came in to join them just because parents can come and join you for lunch and at some point in the middle of lunch the girls got up and just started talking about their experience with this dean and it was really I wish that we had camera phones then we did it, it had like a blackberry but it was really powerful and you know it would stand up and say Dean Chestnut, remember the time when I was in your office and you asked me to do Dean Chestnut remember and they did it over and over and they stood up kind of like a, what do you call those things pop up thing what do you call that you know flash mob, thank you sir thank you thank you baby kind of like a flash mob right they would stand up and they would say this thing and the principal came in and what are you doing and I said you need to listen to these stories and at the time although all the children did it there were other kids and other girls we knew about this the uniform thing but there were other girls of course there were other girls and right now if you go online and google Selma High School and Selma City of Selma Alabama was taken over eventually by the state because that that situation opened up an investigation and there was so much sexual misconduct happening at that school that the state had to come and take it over and that's not an anomaly that's not just a random thing that is the thing that's happening in our schools one of the problems about what's happening in the Me Too movement now is that we are focused on adults instead of focusing on what's happening with our children what's happening with young people sexual harassment happens in the workplace if you think it happens in the workplace what do you think is happening in our high schools we have to shift the focus that's kind of what I'm trying to do I'm trying to shift the narrative on October 15, 2017 when this thing went viral it was the most unexpected thing in my life really I couldn't even sit here and make a joke about what I could expect less probably to get married that's funny to the 40 and over crowd right anyway so but it was so unexpected this is a thing that was a passion to me this is something that I held dear to my heart that I would do and I will do until the day I die but I never expected the world to talk about it because we don't talk about it my experience is this is something that you have to talk about in church basements and in little community centers and in really small groups and it's really gradual work in the last really 12 years doing this really gradual work crisscrossing the country talking to survivors talking to people about how we can get active talking to practitioners about how you can get into the community and serve the most marginalized I couldn't even dream of a time when the national dialogue would be about sexual violence for four months it's fascinating to me I'm fascinated every day people ask me what did you feel like the day when it went viral? scared that's the truth I felt like this thing that had been in my life's work was about to become a pop culture moment that will be fleeting here today and gone tomorrow but we're all in the middle of a lesson aren't we we're all living in the middle of something that we never thought we would see in our lifetime particularly those of us who care about gender based violence there's so many misconceptions about what me too is and the worst of them I think because there's several the worst of them I think, I'm just going to go through a few that this movement is about taking down powerful men wrong not just in my work but even in Alyssa Milano's initial tweet she never said anything about a perpetrator right? it was about making a declaration that everything has happened to you stand up and say this that's what she said what all work has always been about has been about centering and supporting survivors it's never been about what the perpetrators are doing what the media will have you believe is that this is some kind of witch hunt to take down powerful men even the women who talked about Harvey Weinstein didn't call for him to be taken from his seat that's the corporate response to this because these corporations are complicit and so it's easier to say okay we'll fire him take him off the board, take him out his job do all of these things because they don't want to be seen as complicit that Harvey Weinstein did what he was doing for what 20 or 30 years you don't become a multi-millionaire in a company with that kind of behavior without some complicity happening in that company that's just truth and so this whole idea of taking down powerful men does not come from the survivors it comes from other people the other misconception that this is just about sexual harassment in the workplace now this is I just always want to be clear about this sexual violence happens on a spectrum there is on one end sexual harassment and not just in the workplace sexual harassment in schools sexual harassment in churches and institutions in all of these various places where people meet there is some sort of sexual harassment usually takes place particularly when there is power dynamics at play but there is a whole spectrum of things that follow that when times up happen and the golden globes happen and what not everybody is like oh glory we have an answer finally to me too but my thing is me too is not a question that needs answering it is a declaration of what's happening it is an initiative that is about sexual harassment in the workplace and it needs to be we have not had a national real conversation since Anita Hill and we saw how that went and so it's a valuable thing that we have but it's not an answer to me too it's one solution and I submit that we need several solutions me too is also not a silver bullet it's not the only answer what the world and what the media also does is they'll pick out one person so now it's Tarana Burke Tarana Burke has the answer Tarana Burke created me too Tarana Burke how do we stop this don't ask me that I have one solution that I figured out and it's a model for how we can do this work but we need everybody in this work for it to happen I stand on the shoulders of so many women who started doing this work before me this is not just about the me too movement it's about the movement to end gender based violence and we have to keep our focus on that and not make heroes out of people just so we can have another celebrity I have no use for celebrity the golden globes were nice I'm not gonna lie and I like nice things but mostly having a platform an elevated platform to tell this story and talk about this work to have more people listening to this work is my ultimate goal and so the other thing that me too is not about and this is really important this is not a movement that's just for women and I think the misconception comes in because we know that women are largely the victims of gender based violence and sexual violence that's just the truth we know it by the numbers, we know it anecdotally we know that and so of course we will be the face and the voice largely but this is not just a movement for women this is a movement for survivors of sexual violence, period and more importantly it's not just for women it's not just for famous white cisgendered women this is about everybody and I'll tell you what the famous white cisgendered women that I know would agree with that wholeheartedly so we have to stop listening to what and let other people shape what the narrative is about this work the last misconception I really always like to talk about is the fact that because the hashtag me too is a cultural moment so many people feel like in order to show courage they have to use me too I have to post it I have to tell my story I get people every day saying I'm almost there I really want to tell my story but I just can't yet I'm not ready and my answer unequivocally every time is don't if you are not ready don't feel pressured to do that this is not about making people stand up you don't have an obligation to stand up when somebody is sexually assaulted the thing that happens the most is that your right to make decisions about your body is taken away fundamentally that is just wrong and so for us for survivors of sexual violence owning our decisions is very important but you know what deciding to say me too is one decision but deciding not to is also a decision and you need to own that decision it's okay because the reality is that's why I'm here I mean not here at the school but that's why I'm here in general I'm here to represent the people who can't say me too who don't say it there's enough of us out here who are saying it and we speak for you and this idea that because it's on social media you have to participate that's a very dangerous idea it's your process, it's your progress do it in your own time everybody's journey is different now tell you what we are about we are about making it safe for people to speak their truth whatever that truth is we honor everyone's experience with all forms of sexual violence and we are and I say it all the time but I have to keep saying it we are about centering survivors and particularly survivors of color and the most marginalized so I'm talking about queer and trans folks I'm talking about disabled folks I'm talking about the forgotten the people who we don't think about we have to center those people because if we don't they get lost if we start up here somewhere that whole trickle down there y'all know that didn't work right it didn't work it's not the least the most vulnerable because it benefits everybody in the long run and I keep saying that no matter what you hear in the media in this moment because you're going to hear a lot of things there are a lot of other people claiming leadership in this work and they talk about something that this work is not about so I need to clarify but ultimately and this sounds strange to people this is a movement about joy this is a movement about teaching people how to cultivate joy in their lives so that they have that listen I say survivor 20 times a day I'm a survivor you're a survivor we talk about being a survivor you know what we don't talk about we don't talk about survival survival is very different every day as a survivor I have to wake up and decide to survive there's an underbelly to this that we have to be honest about and the thing that makes me afraid about being put up here is this person who has survived or whatever it's that people think there's some kind of north star and it's not I am on a journey that is continuous we will all be on journeys that are continuous sometimes I'm here sometimes I'm not but when I'm not I have learned to cultivate joy in my life in such a way that it holds me until I get here again that's the thing that saved my life really this is about figuring out where the joy is we can't live in our trauma what this moment will have you do is think that me too is where you stop but me too is where you start it's permission to start your journey it's permission to heal it's permission to be out in the world boldly as whoever you are it's the starting point and it's driven by joy it's not driven by trauma I'm also always talking about community healing now community healing is a bit different than individual healing because our own personal journey is individual healing and what I need is very different from what many of you need and so I can't define it for you I can be an example in a model but I can't tell you exactly what to do but community healing is different because we have to define that together this is a community college campuses are certainly communities and when I talk about community healing I'm talking about concrete things people hear healing they think intangible kind of hokey things when I talk about community I'm talking about policies and law and a culture that you create that makes people safe thank you if you are in a community you deserve protection you deserve safety and you have to craft that together you have to figure out what that looks like together solutions should be built around you if you are a survivor and you should be centered in that healing process when I go to schools I try to look up and see what's happening in this school what's going on got your title 9 stuff together what you're supposed to be doing so I can talk about you but this school is doing pretty well you should pat yourself on the back for that at least as far as I can find on Google you can holler me later if there's something I missed but the thing that is consistent on most college campuses is that they have wonderful services for students right they are wonderful services here that I heard about before I got here when I got here but the same problem exists who's using them do the students know about them Cornell University did this this really wonderful study and in the study they talked about all the various reasons why that students do or don't use services or do or don't report and you know their results were like most campuses slightly better in some places need help in other places but there were two things that struck me in their answers about why people don't report three things one of them around harassment sexual assault was they didn't report because they had other things to focus on they didn't think it was serious enough or they just wanted to forget and I don't like to create something where it's not I don't know what's happening here at Roger Williams in that regard but my experience tells me if you think something's not serious enough it usually is and so this is not really an endorsement about the use of campus services it's about the insidious nature of rape culture and what it does is it makes our minds and makes us think things like it's not that serious like in order to have a healing community space that means your school has to have a climate that promotes self-care that discourages shame and encourages you to be open and have spaces where you can go and the resources that are set up are available to you that's what safe spaces look like on a college campus or in any community and so I think it's probably my time what time is it thank you remember the conversation part y'all can talk to me how much time I got left don't tell me that are y'all leaving babies is it their bedtime I will see y'all tomorrow I got a phone number I'll call you bye y'all say bye to the kids thank you for coming so I'm going to wrap up since the kids are going home that's my cue I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what's next for me too movement there's so many stories out now there's all these specials what's next, me too, what's next here's the funny thing about that in the history of the United States of America we have been talking about sexual violence in a national dialogue for four months almost we got a lot more work to do we have a lot more figuring out to do we live in this yeah, you should clap for that we live we live in this culture now that is all about sound bites and media cycles I am fascinated that we're still talking about this we're probably like 10 media cycles in and all kinds of things have happened and it still comes back to be a dominant part of the conversation so that's fascinating to me but I am again an organizer, I've been working in non-profits my whole life, I don't move at the speed of pop culture and I had to realize that and sort of pull back and start figuring out what is it that I want to do with this moment and what I want to do is the same thing I've been doing I just want to do it bigger and so right now if you went on the website on the internet and you tried to find resources as a survivor sitting in your room in your quiet time and said I want to find out what can I do to heal why do I feel this way you know, what if I disclose publicly I don't know what to do now you can't find that you will get sent to one of those big websites that will give you a hotline which is useful and I don't want to act like the hotline is not useful it is but we want to create something that's more personal than that we want to create a space online where survivors can go and really feel like they have the tools they need to start a healing process and at the same time we want to create a space online where people can go, when you leave here today if you feel fired up and you feel like, you know, I need to do something in my community about this I need to figure out what's going on we want to give you action steps these talks don't mean anything if you leave here and you don't know what to do next right people ask me all the time what can I do today we can have a talk about that if you a parent you should know what the vetting process is in your school we know that teachers are fingerprinted but what's happening with the paraprofessionals your kids interact with all kind of people all day how would they vet it I'm not saying go on a witch hunt and go up to the school and start making all kinds of crazy demands but get information what's the sexual harassment policy at your school what's the legislation that's happening in your city or state around sexual violence can you get behind that that's a very easy action step I bet you there's some legislation right now that's trying to pass that needs people to support it publicly statute of limitations is what is happening in New York maybe if it's not happening in Rhode Island what's happening in your home state there are many ways for us to get active and we want to give people guidance around that so the next few months we'll be building out that kind of website that'll be a home for people to do those things but really these next few weeks and months for me is about changing this narrative we have to stop focusing on what the perpetrators are doing and what's happening with the bad doers and talking about boogeyman right now Harvey Weinstein has become the boogeyman and the long list of people that came after them like these individual bad doers are not representatives of a system that is broken if we don't start talking about the systems that are in place that allow those men to flourish and we're having the wrong conversation so I'm just one person and I'm one person who really tried to avoid this work I tried my best I did I tried to avoid it when it happened to me I tried to avoid it when it happened in my family I tried to avoid it when I saw it in my community until I had to be honest with myself about who I am and who I am is not a superhero I'm just a person who can't look at injustice and not do anything and there's so many other people like me out here I know in this audience, in this city in this country and so my job is to ask you to join me I don't care what the world tells you it can't be done alone let's heal together let's heal our communities together let's get active together let's support survivors together let's get active together if you are ready to do that I can only leave you with these two words me too I think I sat in the wrong seat can you hear me hello so once again if we can give a round of applause for Tarana Burke thank you as a reminder my name is Mina Chung I am the associate director of the intercultural center thank you very much I want to thank each and every one of you for showing up and it is a great honor and privilege to share this stage with you so many thoughts emotions insights were popping up in my head as you were sharing the background the context of your story one thing that I took away with is the B2 movement exploded virally in October we have a way of engaging with social media so that it's this thing out there to have you on campus and to hear through your own testimony the work that you've done at the grassroots level the years, the struggle the heartaches and the joys of getting to this place really brings into sharper focus the meaning and purpose of this work is essential and important it is so thank you so much for being here so at this point we are going to switch over to a community dialogue if you notice on the screen to my right your left perhaps depending on where you're positioned if you can go to the url poleev dot com slash rw u this is your opportunity to ask questions I will have my partner in crime who will be helping me to filter some of these questions so that I can make sure that they're showcased so I am going to have my cell phone with me if it looks like I'm distracted I'm just trying to read the questions I'm just going to give the audience a couple minutes to get on the site to input your questions and while I do that I thought maybe I just start off with a question of my own if you don't mind in doing some background research watching all your videos, reading articles all of that some of the points that really struck home for me is the centrality of working with girls and women of color as a woman of color that has special meaning for me and so one of my first questions is that in one of your interviews you stated that women of color and women who have faced generations of exclusion should be at the center of our solutions and so I'm wondering at this point if you could just go a little bit deeper into why that's so fundamentally important absolutely and I talked a little bit about it when I was speaking but what history has shown us and this is just not a personal feeling but we have historical data to back that up is that if you don't center these women we've been marginalized in many ways right and that means push to the margins literally and so when I talk about centering I mean the opposite of that bringing this group of people to the center as the focus because oftentimes these are the people who are the most vulnerable who have the least resources and so in some ways for me it's really common sense right that she would start with the most vulnerable with the least resources to make sure that they're well resourced and have what they need when laws pass that benefit people of color they also benefit other people when laws pass that benefited black people they benefited white women right that's just what we know in some cases and so that is why I talk about that because the other thing is that I think people think it in general but people don't say it we have to say it and keep saying it and keep reminding people and I know some people get I've had these talks and people after it say why don't you talk about black and brown people the whole time or queer and trans people the whole time and I'm just like this is why because people like you will write me and say talk about me and I'm like we always talk about you right one of the top questions of the top comments I get from folks writing to me is that they're not telling our stories I don't see myself represented in this movement now that's a little bit of a not it's not complicated but a little bit of a nuance a layered question I mean response I have to that because on the one hand I think we have to be really vigilant vigilant that's the right word yeah vigilant about representation people need it's important for people to see themselves and I know that me being a black woman being recognized as leadership in this means something but on the other hand I also implore people because I know that communities of color now this may be another question later struggle around a culture of silence when it comes to sexual violence that I have to caution folks from getting caught up in the small arguments the representation is important but we also know historically that we haven't been represented in mainstream media that's just true right not in that is true yes thank you and so if we wait for the media to represent us in order for us to tell our stories they'll never get told and while they're never getting told we're still accumulating survivors in our community and so I really encourage people in communities of color to there has to be somebody to tell the stories we have to also do the work we have to be really honest in this moment and it feels odd to me and I talk a lot in my history about that I started with a history of doing organizing around race because I will always have that as a foundation but there's something that people get uncomfortable about they don't want to talk about the fact that this is not about black on black crime right that's a very different mythical type of thing this is about the reality that in all cultures the people in those cultures are the perpetrators against the other people in their same culture except for Native American folk we need to acknowledge that Native folk are the one group of people of color in this country who are still consistently have people coming from outside of their race perpetrating on there to them but largely that's the reality and so if we get caught up in these like well I don't see my stories told then tell your own story I know that's not your question but it just brings me to that point because it's a what is this word I'm trying to sound smart it's not a red herring it's not a non-starter one of those things it's fake it's a block it's a road block and if we get caught up in that road block then we won't actually ever get to the issue thank you for that you know when we think about systems and structures that necessarily erase the identities of various marginalized minoritized folks it for me from my vantage point it makes sense that one way is to disrupt and and in the effort to dismantle these systems is to bring forward those that are marginalized to the center and to really center their stories this is this next question I'd like to transition I really love this question because a lot of my work is with students who are social justice activists on this campus so thank you I work with MSU MSU folks out there give a shout out Multicultural Student Union I work with my peace leaders okay my zine team there's also SAFE if you're represented Spanish club Women's Collective Femme Society so all of these clubs and orgs and student leadership programs who are social justice centered often have this question around self-care so this question sort of leads a bit to that what is your advice to social justice leaders who need rejuvenation in terms of the work they do who feel as though they are constantly facing walls who feel as though hope is a mask of despair and how would you console and offer advice to these students thank you for that question I do like that question I said this before I'm 44 and I started doing this work when I was 14 I don't like doing that math because it feels ugly numbers are ugly but the reality is I come from a generation that really did not talk about self-care at all because we were raised by the generation before us that was like work till you drop get up work some more there's work to be done there's justice to be done you know that's the way that I was brought up and anything other than that was sort of a sign of weakness I actually had somebody tell me when I got pregnant that it was counter revolutionary that's always funny to me but so now I really love the fact that young people this next generation thinks about self-care I've not had a talk yet where somebody hasn't asked me about what do I do to take care of myself so in answering that question I think about what I would say to me at 20 years old right or 21 or what have you is that self-care is a revolutionary act right you can't do this work if you are depleted and so we have to have that in all our little tenants that we talk about around being social justice advocates it has to be right there amongst the top and I would say another thing is when you talked about hope being a mask of despair you'll learn but I remember when a bunch of my friends somewhere in the early 30's we became Christian we became Christian born again and I was living in the south and it just really feels kind of odd to me I don't even tell them oh y'all gave up hope so he just gonna say Jesus fix it now y'all don't want to fight anymore y'all don't want to fight left in you I realized when I went through a similar process that this was just that they needed we needed something some place to draw hope from we needed a place to rest right and so my advice is and it doesn't have to be Christianity or religion at all but my advice is to make sure that you find a soft place to land this is hard work it's life work it's all day everyday work if you don't have something that you're able to dig into and it's the same thing I was talking about about joy I really I feel like I cultivated I crave it things that bring me joy I keep a journal and talk like I write more joy stuff in my journal than anything else a lot of people like to pour out the trauma and that's fine if that's your process but for me I keep notes about the things that make me happy I spend a lot of time with my daughter and I know that I'm not going to always feel that way and it's the same thing for the work but I have a treasure trove of these joyous moments that I just lean into when those other parts come so you have to kind of be intentional about self-care and when you do this work really in all things but you have to put it on your to-do list be really intentional about it and take it seriously because the world doesn't care it'll eat you up and it's going to be the next social justice person right after you I love that you're saying that and I hope many of the students that I work with and other students in here really understand how self-love is an act of political resistance absolutely so my student leaders here who hear me say this all the time Toronto backs me up so this next question speaks to some of the struggles that many students find when they want to engage in social justice work especially around the Me Too movement or to disrupt sexual violence how would you suggest talking about Me Too or the Me Too movement with individuals who don't support it or don't understand it I get this question a lot too so here's the thing this is about your work in general I really over time have created I'm at a loss for words tonight but I subscribe a little bit of time to do that work I talk to people first there's this sort of idea that you shouldn't individualize and so that when men say for instance oh I want to see gender justice because I have a wife or a sister or a mother and the push back from us is like you should do it because we're human which is true by the way shouldn't be predicated on some woman in your life it's very true the other part to that though is that if you need to personalize and individualize it as a spark I actually do encourage that when we talk about organizing all the time it's about taking people from where they are so maybe you initially want to be engaged or involved because you're connected to some woman or some person that brings you to this space and then it's the organizers or the activist role to educate you beyond that and give you a deeper analysis and so I think that for people who are trying to deal with folks who may not agree or giving them push back whether it's me too or other things it could help to personalize it put them in a position where they have some empathy and understanding for what's happening but the flip side to that is I only give a little bit of time to that right we have so much work to do and you have this up to you to decide what that time is but you can't spend so much time trying to preach to folks to convert them we just have too much work to do and there are enough people who actually want to do the work so at some point I find the people who want to do the work and I engage with them deeply because it may be not ten people it may be four people but if you engage with the four people deeply versus having ten people that you have to pull their teeth to get them there I think you do better and more meaningful work with the four so that would be my advice I mean some people may not agree with that but I just can't and maybe because I'm old I just can't spend a lot of time after a while you learn that you want so badly for everybody to agree everybody's not going to agree like my grandmother used to say everybody can't come that's just truth what I appreciate you mentioning at the the last end of your talk is that Me Too really is just the beginning and that much of the work whether it is around collective healing or individual healing happens thereafter that Me Too really is just a start this next question is really pointing to a more global perspective which interestingly enough more recently I saw on news coverage the ways in which Me Too has expanded to South Korea the place of my birth so folks out thank you very much Dawn so folks survivors out in South Korea have really taken to this and that's been phenomenal this question asks do you hope that Me Too would expand globally especially in countries where girls aren't allowed to have a voice no it definitely has it is everywhere in the world I've been invited all kind of places I get messages and letters from all kind of places definitely this is a global phenomenon and in some ways I think that people outside of the United States actually understand the Me Too movement when you see it reported on the news it's always in this frame of like who is Me Too taking down next or the Me Too movement is going after so and so and in other places it's more what I've seen has been more about this thing that I talk about which is how can we support it look at all these people who have said Me Too what can we do to support them and so yes to answer that question the UNICEF campaign called HER2 which I supported essentially that is about just that about the places in the world where people don't have the wherewithal or the capacity to stand up and say Me Too but that we know that these huge violations in sexual sexual violence is happening rapidly and so I am so just it feels my heart when I think about the ability of this movement to move the needle in places like that to switch gears a little bit I really appreciate how you frame the importance of survivors telling their stories that that is an important process especially for those that have been silenced but that storytelling alone is not the solution to healing and that instead it is the work that happens there after and how the cultivation of love and joy is a means to facilitate that healing process so this next question from the audience points to that or speaks to that sentiment you know what are some positive steps that you can suggest to help survivors begin that healing process so what are those positive steps after the Me Too oh listen that's my favorite part when I hold we hold healing circles and one of the things that healing circles people don't hear that right sometimes one of the things that and that's one of the mechanisms that we're going to expand and try to teach people how to do healing circles but the question I start off asking survivors in every circle is and this is written without your trauma I think the start to the healing journey to stop before you get to the cultivate and the joy in learning that part is you have to unlearn the other part and so when I think about actionable steps I think about we have to interrogate the trauma and it's scary and people who have survivors in the audience may understand when I say this there is a way that we allow it to become our identity our identity is just sort of couched in this thing that happened to us and we get stuck there and so the first thing that I ask people is who are you without your trauma and it's a hard question for people to answer you know even people who think that they don't think about the trauma or dealing with trauma all the time it's a hard question to answer but I would advise people or just say in terms of actionable steps start asking yourself questions I also ask people describe what your life looks like without it what are the things and then nine times out of ten when they start listening to those things they already exist some of those things already exist but we society and our brains even trick us into leaning into the parts that hurt the most and so one, having interrogating your trauma, interrogating these things that you are holding on to is one way the other thing is the really beautiful thing about this moment being so public because you know I had trepidation about how public it is and really about public disclosure because there's so many things that come along with that but there's a global community that has grown from this moment right and so talk to folks there's a way, the reason why I say I talk about empowerment through empathy because the idea of me too is about an exchange of empathy between survivors and so if you are somebody who's trying to figure out where to start seek out somebody who you think like people do mean oh I want to get healed like you I'm not healed because that's not really a thing I'm always healing but seek out somebody maybe they put the hashtag up maybe it's a friend and find spaces where you can just be yourself and what I mean by that is not just a space to come in our healing circles we spend with you maybe times we meet we don't really talk about our particular stories anymore right it's just about existing in a space where you can be 100% yourself with all of the quirks and weird things that survivors do to survive and feel normal and feel okay I think another piece of advice I give people is to try to find and cultivate those kind of spaces it doesn't it may feel uncomfortable at first but it's so helpful when you talk to somebody and you say you know there are all of these things I have I have issues with memory now it's just a reality but it's a result of spending most of my life trying not to remember I spent good chunks of my life being I'm also a Virgo y'all in the audience know what that means and so I have a very carefully regimented life in some ways and so for me I mapped out in my brain how I think about my days I can't think about that because it's going to take me down this road so I stay here and so the result of that is that I have a terrible memory and that's a hard thing to explain to people like why is your memory so bad oh because yeah I survived this thing but when you get in a room with other survivors I mean we tell terrible jokes jokes you could never say to people who are outside of that sort of community but it's so helpful to me I feel it's a place it's the soft place to land and so that's some of the advice we would give but that's also why we want this website so people can start figuring out those things I think that's incredibly important as in these kinds of communities when you can hold space for each other you become powerful mirrors of healing so it appears that we may have time for one last question so this question is really um uh around what to do next especially for those that truly want to engage and be active in this movement or active as social justice leaders you know when thinking about sexual violence um you know we often think about it on the individual level um sexual violence happening um just to the person by the perpetrator or um if it ever gets to the point of uh legal cases that it happens to the judicial system um but acts of individual acts of sexual violence are indicative of larger systemic structures um that intersect with institutionalized racism sexism heterosexism and classism so that disrupting and dismantling these oppressive systems and structures is really indeed a collective effort right um so especially for those interested in transforming these oppressive systems and structures you know where do you suggest they begin especially from the vantage point of a college student who that's a heavy question I'm trying to get you know again I always quote my elders because they were so wise and I had one that always say begin at the beginning but really these ways that we come together these collect these groups like the ones you called out these we have to begin with one having a real understanding of what those systems are right I think we get caught up like the the the word of the year now is the word of the last few years intersectionality like everybody talks about intersectionality very few people know who Kimberly Crenshaw is very few people understand where it comes from and what it actually means but we love to throw it around and so I I always try to implore people particularly in college if you are in these groups you have to start with an I love the word interrogate but I do feel like you have to start with an interrogation of what these things are have a deep understanding of what these systems are so that you can understand how we have to start doing the work of breaking them down the other thing is sometimes and and I know I talked a little bit about representation earlier but sometimes there are there are several ways to go at dismantling systems sometimes it is appearing opposite right is is doing the thing that the the system is trying to put in place so if it's patriarchy and and we start putting like women in places where these patriarchy exist and and and flipping those things on his head that's how you start dismantling a system and so I think young people should really examine what those systems are and they're so y'all are so clever just say this this generation you have so many more resources and you're so smart like I at 19 had zero gender analysis zero it wasn't even something we thought about even as a woman right and so you have this this really broad analysis now think people understand rape culture when I say rape culture doesn't sound like some weird thing use that use this the resources that you have with the internet and social media you can create your own media that's phenomenal to me think about the resources you have list them out as groups and the other thing is and this is I think probably the most important this is not I'm not trying to be all like kumbaya what have you but we really do have to work across lines these things that what's oppressing me is also oppressing you right we talk about racial things what you think is happening to poor white folks in Appalachia or in deep south they're doing just as bad as we are but we get caught in these you know the pockets that people want us to be caught in and so we need to work across class lines and race lines and gender lines religious lines we need to work across these lines and tandem with each other because the man they depend on us hating each other they depend on us not working together they depend on us being separate but in order for us to work together all of them words and things I told you to interrogate you got to do that first we're not going to forget about intersectionality just because we got to work together so you got to figure that part out and be committed to figuring that part out so that when we come to work together we can do that well I think what has happened in the past is that people we I mean brave and brilliant idea we should work together people have been trying to work together forever but the clash has happened when people aren't invested in the other person's thing right now in this work we're doing between like Time's Up and Me Too you're looking at domestic workers and farm workers and restaurant workers and people from all kind of disabled folks and people from all kind of marginalized communities coming together to lean into our commonality but we have really robust discussions about our differences right there's not just what people saw and I'm glad to end on this what people saw in the Golden Globes was some really you know fancy schmancy kind of whatever thing and it really was it looked wonderful and we were all dressed up but I always talk of that was an action when you are an organizer and you're doing movement work it consists of several different actions the action there we spent the night before in t-shirts and sweatpants on the floor and I'm not bragging but like Merrill Street next to Rosa Clemente and you know all of these different activists and organizers sitting there hashing out the differences because it was really important for us for them to understand that we are one we're not accessories and that that action happened because as an individual somebody came to me and said we want you to come to the Golden Globes right and this is an important part important point and I think it relates to the question a little bit but still somebody came to me individually and said I want you to come to the Golden Globes my response to that was and again this is I'm just trying to illustrate a point about movement together my response to that was why I won't be the black woman that you tried out to validate your mediocre work right and so we had a really good conversation about the why and I thought it was genuine but I said you know what I'm one person who's been doing this work for a long time and in doing this work I have come across so many other bad ass women just like me who are not doing this work but they're doing important work and you can have but what would it look like if we had a sea of activist women of color on this red carpet all of us using this moment to elevate our issues all of us taking a moment away from the celebrities to talk about issues that affect us as a whole what would that look like that's an action me walking the red carpet by myself is just a thing it's just an event it's here and it's gone you had 10 women on that red carpet who represented issues 10 different issues and we used that moment that is what you call an action and so we have to learn and we have to educate the non-activist women in some degree right and they had to educate us to some degree but real work went into that and I use that point to illustrate that real work went into that none of it was by accident and so I think that it's a model it's a model for how we have to learn how to work together to dismantle these systems because again they count on us being oh they're rich and they're white and they're famous they would never talk to me when I'm black and not rich and not you know what I mean I'm doing this issue I'm working with little black and brown girls in the community and you know I Jen is working with Asian American folks and whatever like the farm workers they don't think that we were going to talk to each other but even amongst our own activist circles farm workers don't support restaurant workers we hadn't thought across those lines and I think that's the real solution here is to dig in I know more now about what happens to low wage workers in America that I ever have but I'm invested in that in a real way and so that's I think that's a part of the solution that we are that's going to make a real difference about how we move the needle absolutely I think there's certainly much to be said about moving the needle when we can work across these differences and when we look at the ways in which systems and structures are set up to prevent us from actually working together thank you for that so this concludes our evening first I'd like to thank the audience for coming and participating and for entering your questions and engaging in this dialogue so thank you very much on behalf of the Roger Williams community I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for this extraordinary opportunity for you to come to our campus to share the Genesis the history and the context of your work that dated all the way back from the 90s to the present and it is in part because of your work and the work of your colleagues and the community that you built around that work which has truly been grassroots and revolutionary that has brought this attention to the forefront it has been extraordinary I know that in this campus across the nation and now globally folks are understanding the importance of me too and me too is just the beginning of a greater process so thank you so much thank you so much