Playboy Interview: Tarana Burke

A candid conversation with the activist who launched Me Too — more than a decade prior to Weinsteingate — on backlash, boundaries and the future of the movement.

Before Me Too was a hashtag, before social media gave everyday people the power to have public conversations about sexual harassment, assault and rape — and before the inevitable and ongoing backlash — Tarana Burke was working with young girls, most of them black, encouraging them to share their most traumatic stories by offering her own. Now 45 years old, the Bronx-bred activist has spent some two decades providing space for those testimonies.

In 2003, Burke launched an organization that would eventually become Just Be Inc., offering fellowship and programming meant to empower young women of color. One of its first campaigns, which Burke named Me Too, showed survivors of all genders that even their darkest trauma could be processed within a community — that together they could change what feminists have long called rape culture. Soon Burke’s organization relocated from Selma, Alabama, near her alma mater of Auburn University, to Philadelphia. In 2015, having reached thousands of girls, she moved back to New York and put the program on hiatus.

Flash forward to October 15, 2017: Ten days after The New York Times published a landmark story on the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the name of Burke’s campaign went viral thanks to a tweet by Alyssa Milano. Burke felt blindsided. And now that scores of powerful men have been taken to task and #MeToo has come to define this historical moment, she is an icon — a reluctant icon, but one with the substance and vision to make the moment a movement.