Tarana Burke Quotes

There is no question that self-hate severely limits one’s capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly. Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in discussions of love.

Dangerous is the woman who can give herself what she used to seek from others. Limitless is the woman who dares to name herself. The way I see it, shame cannot oppress what acceptance has already claimed for sovereignty.

Maybe community creates courage. What if courage creates community? Maybe empathy creates courage. How can you express empathy towards others if you can't empathize with your own self? Is the core of healing empathy and courage?

If unkindness is indeed a serial killer, then my revelation is that I was my own murderer. I had taught myself to bend to my own unkindness first, so that I would be able to withstand the unkindness of others. I will not bend anymore.

Unkindness is a serial killer.

The Me Too movement, started by Tarana Burke, made visible the overwhelming number of situations where assault and harassment happen, the way violence is embedded in our day-to-day lives, pointed out countless conversations and gestures we’d been taught to write off as insignificant. Me Too is a tail-end phrase, meant to be tacked on, in addition to. It is inextricable from a greater mass, immune to isolation. By stating those words, you didn’t have to divulge your full story in graphic detail, you just gave a nod, raised your hand. Speaking up didn’t force you to step into a spotlight, only helped you contribute to a glowing, innumerable whole. The Me Too movement offered the relief of finally being given a chance to set the story down, to see what it felt like to walk around, breathe, shake your arms out a little, without it.

Unkindness is a serial killer. Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean-spirited, cruel words and actions that poison you over time. I guess that’s why I can’t stand the old children’s rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Every time I hear it, I think to myself: that’s a lie. You can dodge a rock, but you can’t unhear a word. You can’t undo the intentional damage that some words have on your mind, body, and spirit. Especially a word like ugly.

There are few things more painful than watching the folks you love actively not love you back. Especially when they aren’t outwardly unkind or distant or they’ve spoken words that sounded like love and have provided support that could be construed as love without an understanding of the kind of love you need and deserve.

Systems of white supremacy teach us shame because they have no guilt. Rejecting shame for Black lives means rejecting individual responsibility for structural failures. (Unlearning Shame and Remembering Love by Yolo Akili Robinson)

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. Because of this, when I thought of my experience, I didn’t hold my abusers accountable—I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong.

The truth always needs a resting place or it will lie down wherever it sees fit.

At the time, the whispers to keep silent and appear normal were deafening. And so we did. There is no blame here. We were just trying to survive. (Where the Truth Rests)

I embraced joy as my birthright. Radical black joy is inherent as a human need and not some special trinket you get after you rise high enough on the social-economic ladder or unlock some special level of desirability or accomplishment. –Tanya Denise Fields, “You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience and the Black Experience” (edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown)

Many people assumed that phrase began with Weinstein. But the Me Too campaign had been around for over a decade. It was originated by black civil rights activist Tarana Burke, in 2006. None of this was new. It was just that nobody paid much attention, until now.

We’re afraid that the feeling of joy won’t last, or that there won’t be enough, or that the transition to disappointment (or whatever is in store for us next) will be too difficult. We’ve learned that giving in to joy is, at best, setting ourselves up for disappointment and, at worst, inviting disaster. And we struggle with the worthiness issue. Do we deserve joy, given our inadequacies and imperfections?

You deserve safety. You deserve protection. You deserve love. You deserve peace. Breathe beloved. Let's do it together. Right now! Breathe in what I'm saying. Breathe out what you were thinking. We tell the world they don't have to be anything but themselves to be worthy. And then we work until the stress is about to kill us to prove our worth. It's not just you. It’s not just us. It's the paradox of deeply melanated women. But right now I need you to hear me, because if we are still alive, then there is still hope to beat this thing.

I’m writing to you right now because if you haven’t changed by now, I’m afraid of what else might have been added to this list.

We tell the world they don’t have to be anything but themselves to be worthy, and then we work until the stress is about to kill us to prove our worth.

When we share our stories, practice empathy, and deconstruct the beliefs that induce shame, we become “shame resilient.” Shame resilience provides the gift of wholehearted living.

Joy is an act of resistance,” and so we will lean in to that joy, knowing that our humanity demands that we fully partake of this magical experience.

Rage forms when grief has not been allowed or honored.

After all, I didn’t see my story as my gift, only as my shame.

Kaia was as much my caretaker as I was theirs.

As long as we are not living in our full humanity, we cannot create a world for humanity.

I don’t believe we can have conversations about racial justice or gender justice or class justice if we don’t talk about shame and trauma. I don’t think it’s possible. It’s actually necessary.

You are simply in this new moment. Grief was here. Now, in this moment, there is laughter. You can welcome both. -Dr. Byron (Running Out of Gas from You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience)

But we miss all that and, in turn, miss the opportunity to be agents of the Spirit’s healing—because we are too deeply invested in certainty as a marker of our faith. Ironic since, by definition, faith requires a relinquishing of certainty.

They wanted a good girl. And a smart girl. So we gave them what they wanted and put those heavy things like fear and shame and confusion in our small box so that we could take it out when no one was looking. It was brilliant, until the box started getting full and then got too heavy.

We are vulnerable even when we are not. We are vulnerable even when we have not chosen to be. The existence of Black women is always under assault. Our hair is an insult and our bodies are violated. Our Black brothers, sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunties are all vulnerable. We can disappear, be assaulted, be murdered under the color of law without recourse. Despite our credentials and accolades, we can be the first to be laid off. We know this and we are reminded of this. We are always vulnerable—living without certainty and at risk.

Sometimes I wake up and have to remind myself: There is nothing wrong with me. I have patterns to unlearn, new behaviors to embody, and wounds to heal. But there is nothing wrong with me and the core of who I am. I am unlearning generations of harm and remembering love. It takes time.

We have decried and diminished women for how they express their feelings, how they expose their vulnerability. At the same time, we yell and scream and punch walls, all while complaining that women are “too emotional.” We fail to see that our expressions of masculine rage are, in fact, emotions. And in our rage, we are never told that we are too sensitive or too emotional.

TARANA: That’s so interesting, right? That’s another reason why antiracist work is important. You have to engage with Black humanity, because the expansiveness of our humanity is so great that it reaches to other people. I don’t want to sound all kumbaya and “we’re all just human beings,” but we’re all just human beings whose experiences and environments and these systems have affected in different ways. But we must tear away the layers to reveal the core, then work our way back from that.

Imposter syndrome grew into self-doubt, and my thoughts snowballed from You aren’t good enough to write this essay to You aren’t good enough to write any essay. I was shame-spiraling, people-pleasing, and, most worrisome, when I wrote, I was performing for the white gaze and consumerism. Thinking of all the ways I would or could be applauded and praised for work I had yet to even complete. True to exactly what I research, fear, doubt, and cynicism were hindering my ability to be present. I had to tune out everything and every voice around me and remind myself that this work, like all my work, was a try. It was, and I am, allowed to be and become without expectation.

Environmental factors matter a great deal in the ripening of grapes. If, for example, a grape does not get enough sunlight or gets too much light or warmth from the sun, it can cause the fruit to go into “survival mode.” Sometimes the effect is that grapes do not fully mature and balance sweetness with acidity, and they can be too much of one or the other. So the product is much more concentrated. Similarly, as our environmental factors around us grow extreme, we, too, go into survival mode. This can greatly influence our ability to balance and can cause a sort of concentration of our own product. Jessica, right now you may not be able to produce a full-bodied Cabernet. Right now, you may be a port, and that is okay, isn’t it? In fact, it’s wonderful. Allow yourself this moment. The

Healing-centered engagement is akin to the South African term 'ubuntu," meaning that humanness is found through our interdependence. collective engagement, and service to others.

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And in that moment, this moment, I realized that perhaps I’ve scratched at the emotional laceration of shame, of selfishness. But if my mother is right, the itching isn’t coming from infection anymore, it’s coming from the fact I’ve never removed the dressing from the wound.

Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean-spirited, cruel words and actions that poison you over time. I guess that’s why I can’t stand the old children’s rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Maybe community creates courage. What if courage creates community? Maybe empathy creates courage. How can you express empathy towards others if you can’t empathize with your own self? Is the core of healing empathy and courage?

I have never had the privilege of experiencing shame as just a feeling. I, like so many of us, was introduced to shame from birth as an intrapsychic and systemic reality. I was branded with shame by virtue of my Black skin, wide nose, and limp wrist. I was indoctrinated with shame from the history books to the media to my communities’ unanswered demands for justice.

Stop yelling over it and listen to it: What is your anxiety trying to tell you?” I had never considered that my anxiety was a voice. It would be years until I could recognize that voice as my own, but from that session, I began working on trying to hear my anxiety before it started to scream, when it was still communicating at a whisper. I found that the only way to really hear was to get still and listen; the only way to get through my panic was to surrender.

At first, I wanted to categorize “the work” as forgiving myself for not living up to the expectations of being an Educated Black Woman who could handle anything thrown at her and keep her cool. But truly, it was unlearning those expectations and accepting myself for who I am, as I am, that was my salvation.

I was finding my strength in ways that were foreign to me previously because I was listening to my own voice instead of the echoes of expectation. I learned that being an Educated Black Woman meant asking for help a lot, but most of all it required me to completely redefine the idea of strength.

To be Black in predominantly white spaces for the majority of your days often means affirming yourself or going without affirmation and representation for long stretches at a time. Aggressions like “I don’t see color” or assumptions that educational achievement somehow offsets racism and sexism are laughable and offensive. We are intentionally robbed of opportunities to see the spectrum of who we can become. Without an accurate reflection, our world becomes a funhouse mirror of distorted expectations we can never meet. More often than not, the people around me believe that they are doing me a favor by not acknowledging my differences.

The container is beyond capacity, and we clearly can’t hold all of this truth on our own. We will succumb to it if we try. The truth always needs a resting place or it will lie down wherever it sees fit.

through the lens of white supremacy, being Black is shame. And how we struggle to love ourselves and move through that shame is synonymous with how we battle white supremacy.

How dare you not be strong? How dare you not be together? You should be ashamed. You have slept in bed for days. Black people are not this way. You don’t get to be this way. How dare you be crazy, unkempt, reckless? How dare you not know all things? How dare you not be an unfeeling animal, unfazed by the woes of the world? Who told you that you had the right to be white?

For too long shame has been a central organizing force in Black communities. We have used shame to motivate people to go to church. To vote. To control women’s bodies and sexual desires. To toss away our trans and gay children and take roles in institutions that tear our communities apart. To transform shame in our communities, we are going to have to weed it out. We are going to have to find a way to express our concern that doesn’t equate to our noses in the air or our backs turned on our ugly. We are going to have to chant from the street corners to the halfway homes, from the ERs and the encampments to the church pews and the house and ball competitions, to every Black life we come across: Shame is not your name.

Men are the head, but we are the neck, and we turn the head any way we want without it realizing it’s being turned.

In addition to the tamping down of our intelligence and sexuality, these women were not supposed to cry about any of it. To deal, we were only supposed to sneak sips of cognac from the flasks held in our bosoms. Or maybe take an extra one of those white pills with the number ten on the back. Or stuff our faces with that three-piece dark chicken on white bread with extra hot sauce. We were supposed to do whatever it took to silence that part of ourselves that wanted both Jesus and liberty. There was no room for mourning the station in life we’d accepted. Any emotional expression of our pain was a sign of weakness or rebellion. So we saved our tears for high worship because, at least then, we knew God could bottle them up.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I was smart, charming, a perfectionist, wholesome, acceptably available but not so accessible that men could feel entitled, and yet here I was again. There is nothing you can do to take the target off your back when that is literally the way systems are designed. When you survive something once already, you’d think that would be the end of it, but somehow, despite all my work, I was here again.

Dangerous is the woman who can give herself what she used to seek from others. Limitless is the woman who dares to name herself. The way I see it, shame cannot oppress what acceptance has already claimed for sovereignty.

To be Black and a woman is to be drafted into targeted identity groups that often conflate classism, sexism, racism, genderism. This begins so early when you’re “the Only”: the only Black child at a predominantly white school, the only Black child in a neighborhood, the only Black child on a sports team, on a street, in a store. You may become a wealthy and highly educated Black woman, but still, when you’re seen, you’re seen as everything that a white supremacist society associates with being a Black woman: poor, uneducated, promiscuous, unattractive, sassy, loud. You walk into every room at a deficit. Unacceptable. Unaccepted.

Shame is often the barrier to wholehearted living.

I encountered a visceral response to ambiguity. I was more than a control freak. The need for certainty had defined every area of my life and hindered my ability to move forward in areas that appeared too “gray” for my liking.

We tell the world they don’t have to be anything but themselves to be worthy, and then we work until the stress is about to kill us to prove our worth. It’s not just you. It’s the paradox of deeply melanated women.

Having hope and maintaining hope is a chore. And that’s something we should be honest about. Right, it’s work. It’s not easy to be hopeful all the time. That’s the beautiful part about having people around you who are encouraging and who are constantly reminding you that you are built for this moment, that you are meant for this moment, that you are right for this moment.” (Tarana Burke, in conversation with Ai-Jen Poo).

Your work is so important to me and my experience as a human being, but as a Black woman, I often felt like I had to contort myself to fit into the work and see myself in it. I wanted to talk to you about adding to it: “What is the Black experience with shame resilience?” Because white supremacy has added another layer to the kind of shame we have to deal with, and the kind of resilience we have to build, and the kind of vulnerability that we are constantly subjected to whether we choose it or not.

We often carry our trauma in similar ways, but the roads that led us to the trauma are all so different. We must pay attention to that road. That road is our humanity. That road is the piece that we’re talking about. A lot of times, we’re happy and relieved to find similarities: “Oh, you too? You too? Me too.” No pun intended. These experiences create community, and it’s wonderful, but it is still critical to understand the very different paths that led you to the trauma.

For Black people, and other people of color, there is a level of apprehension that isn’t wrought from an uneasy feeling of undeservedness but from the knowledge that racism is the silent stalker always willing to wring joy from our lives. This level of foreboding joy is not in our heads; it’s in the evidence of our experience.

the data revealed by systemic racism isn’t a vague notion but a real enemy that may turn and come after me, at the moment when I’m too joyful to pay attention.

White superiority, which lashes out in racism, is wholly uninterested in deservedness. It is persistent beyond poverty, beyond socioeconomics, beyond educational attainment or even celebrity status. It does not care how hard you work or where you live. It is not interested in how you dress or speak. My skin means that I am always a worthy candidate to be the victim of white superiority and its tragic possibilities.

This is the lens through which I saw myself, defined by others.

Joy, happiness, health, safety, love, and abundant community are inherent. You don’t have to perform or do anything—for anyone—to get them. Imagine if we lived in a world in which this narrative was the one instilled in us instead of the capitalist, anti-Black one that roots us in lack, shame, guilt, and insecurity.

I realized that happiness didn’t have to be aspirational, that every good thing in this world that was denied to me and them because of some arbitrary bullshit ideology that we had no say in was inherently ours to claim, and I said that shit too. I said it loudly, sweetly, and abrasively. I was insistent, maybe even dogged, but I didn’t care. I was giddy. This shit felt good, and I felt more free than I ever had in my life.

I don’t want joy to be radical for Black women, femmes, and girls. I want it to be normal, to be expected, to be inherent. I want us to fully be.

Trauma, then, was also not what we called the things that happened between us, when the pressure and powerlessness exploded into intimate violence. Those were secrets and things we endured. We found hiding places in our bodies for all these memories, because no one I knew had the time or resources to heal. On Sundays, we took those places to church and prayed that we could be delivered from them somehow without naming them or feeling them or looking them squarely in the face. They were too big or too many or too close.

Shame is also the way that oppression becomes internalized. It is an emotional ritual for the marginalized. It is a practice necessary to maintain our already conditional belonging here. We feel shame about the aspects of ourselves that are most fundamental to who we are, that are tied not only to our actions but to our essence. Our Blackness, our genders, our Queerness, and all the things that accompany them—our skin tones, our shapes, our hair textures, our cadences, our desires. And we feel shame about the secrets we hold, many that we hold to keep us together.

It’s important to name that this task of healing sits against a political backdrop, and that backdrop doesn’t allow us to simply individualize healing or imagine that it could ever be an apolitical endeavor. For Black people, many of the tools and technologies used by our ancestors to heal have been taken or suppressed. And the extent of the traumas we have experienced has been constant and collective, overwhelming our efforts and our resources to address.

What are our politics if not the method through which we create and distribute wellness with what we have? What is culture if not our practices of resilience?

the need for healing does not disappear because we have found a way to survive. This work of healing waits for us in moments of stillness or intimacy, in the persistence of doubt or shame, in our struggles to find or sustain stories of meaning or risk living into our purpose. The dissonances we can feel are all the breaks we survived, waiting to be unraveled through feeling, waiting ultimately to free us and our lineage.

Our pain aversion makes this question of healing challenging to approach. It is one of the central motivators in American culture, to win our way to a pain-free existence. This does not mean that we do not experience pain—all of us do—but it means that we hide it, we deny it, and we transfer it as custom. It means that we shape the world to outsource suffering, that we create structures to concentrate this pain and mythologies of superiority to justify it. These are the mechanics of oppression. It is the organization and distribution of trauma across a society. Those with more power can choose more of their pain.

Healing Black trauma is one of the most worthwhile endeavors we all can undertake. It is one that calls for the remaking of all social relations and an examination of our structures and the principles on which they are built. How has denying Black pain narrowed all of our lives? Where have we gone numb to our trauma, imagining that it is too big to face?

The truth is that I don’t know what we become when we heal. None of us does. That is the wisdom of the process.

Kaia could relax for a few hours while I attempted to retwist or style their loc’d hair. I

I believed that she felt like a Phenomenal Woman as she delivered each line with an audacity and authenticity I had never seen before. I felt like I knew the kind of pain she had to be holding because it was the same pain I held every single day. Where had her shame gone? How had it not seeped into her cells, and if it had, how did she get it out? And if all of it - the pain, shame, and fear - were still there, where did she find space for this thing I saw in her face and heard in her voice? What was this softness? Where did the joy come from?

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Patriarchy has created a culture in which men aren’t allowed to feel and women are often punished for doing so publicly. Avoiding emotions has resulted in abuse of power in many forms and at many levels.

Where do you light the fire?” Tarana Burke asks. “Your sphere of influence is a perfect place to start and end. . . . And if that is where you are a revolution for the rest of your life, that’s okay. What this moment in time tries to tell us is that your work is not real, your efforts aren’t big enough—if it’s not the Me Too movement, if it’s not Black Lives Matter, if it’s not that, then you haven’t done your job, you haven’t done enough. But I think that people need to understand just how important it is for people to see you want to be a revolution, for you to understand the people who you are influencing right around you. And that’s enough.

Lust and rage have always been hallmarks of American manhood. And they’re supported by the assertion they are representative, too, of a certain kind of logic. They make sense. They’re reasonable. They’re certainly not womanish, which is limited to crying or hysteria. (“Hysteria” comes from the Greek, meaning “womb”—where life is formed.) We have decried and diminished women for how they express their feelings, how they expose their vulnerability. At the same time, we yell and scream and punch walls, all while complaining that women are “too emotional.” We fail to see that our expressions of masculine rage are, in fact, emotions. And in our rage, we are never told that we are too sensitive or too emotional. As long as our only legible emotion is anger, we are never shamed.

I get all the benefits of being progressive when the world is watching. When no one is watching is when we are truly being tested.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We must come together to heal. Our village is counting on it.

You are simply in this new moment. Grief was here. Now, in this moment, there is laughter. You can welcome both.

It’s hard to unlearn whiteness when it’s being pushed on you your whole life as a “good thing,” especially in art institutions and universities. For mainstream media, the imagery of Blackness has been controlled and contrived into how white folx view our community. I’m in control of my narrative, and I’m going to tell my story.

I will continue your legacy of protecting our community through resilience, love, and rage.

Shame is defined by Brené Brown as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

too tired or too jaded to think we can survive without it. I carried the shame that popped up in that cafeteria with me to high school, throughout college, and well into adulthood. Along the way I picked up the shame of being bad at numbers, of hating the way my voice sounded, of needing

Systems of faith are systems before they are places of faith. They are made by people and share the flaws of their builders.

God’s hand is beckoning us to question the ways we allow people to live in, stand in, and share their truths. And it is my prayer that we will be willing to see the testimonies of women like Dr. Blasey Ford, Tarana Burke, and Anita Hill. They are certainly clarion angels of the Divine, as holy gifts pointing us toward God’s desire that we believe women—for their names are Emmanuel, “God with us.

I had set out to reinvent myself, but it turned out that I didn’t have to start from scratch. I just had to dust myself off, because the best parts were already there.