- 11 hours ago
- #survivorsagenda
Tarana Burke, Angelica Ross, and Salamishah Tillet are joining us LIVE for the Me Too Movement's #SurvivorsAgenda Black Femme Town Hall.
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00:00Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us here this evening for the Black Women and Girls
00:18Survivor Town Hall, hosted by Essence and Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement.
00:24We're here to talk about the lives and experiences, the struggles and the challenges that Black
00:31femmes face in the United States regarding issues of sexual violence and sexual trauma
00:38and how we as individuals and collectives try to overcome them. So I would like to introduce
00:44our guest tonight. We have with us here Tarana Burke, who is the founder, as I said, of the
00:51movement. And we also have with us Delica Ross, who, from television to Hollywood to the White
01:04House, has been really integral in advocating for and pushing agendas for racial and transgender
01:12equality here in the United States. And before we begin the conversation, I would introduce myself.
01:17My name is Alicia Tillett. I'm the co-founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit that uses art to
01:24empower young people to end violence against girls and women. And I'm also a sexual assault survivor,
01:31a writer, and an artist myself. So let's open this conversation. This is a very difficult
01:37topic, right? We all know the challenges that we've either individually experienced or know
01:42people who've experienced sexual assault. So I wanted to begin the conversation with something
01:47a little bit more personal. Why do you think it's so hard for Black girls and women to kind
01:54of come forward with their stories, Black femme girls and women to come forward with their
01:59stories of sexual assault? And maybe in your own experiences, you can talk about a particularly
02:05challenging moment. Because sometimes I think people don't really understand, like they see everyone so
02:10successful, and they actually don't understand the ways in which this trauma impacts us. And it's
02:17something we have to overcome. Something that our success is done in spite of, not because of. So I just
02:23wanted to open it up to both of you.
02:27Well, I can start. Okay. Yeah, I think that right off the bat, we know that the moments when Black people even open
02:40their mouth to speak up about anything, we run the risk of not being believed, not being heard, not being seen. That rises
02:50exponentially as you add on to that. You know, Black women, Black femmes, Black trans folks, it gets
02:57further, you get further and further away from believability when we open up to talk about our pain and
03:03talk about our trauma. And so that's been a reality in this country and around the world for a long time. I think it's
03:10extra hard when you know that you're going to have sort of the double whammy of not being believed outside
03:17of your community and in your community. And you watch other people who come forward and to no avail, right,
03:25to see. I often use the comparison for folks to try to draw the picture of Harvey Weinstein versus R. Kelly. And in that, you know, for about 20 years,
03:39Black women were yelling and screaming in the wind, mostly Black women, about R. Kelly, about how these horrible
03:51things that we've been hearing about from the video to the stories from, you know, Girls Who Escape, all these
03:56kind of things. There were exposés written. There were, and I mean, by major newspapers, right, Chicago Tribune,
04:04Village Voice, several exposés. There were several times when he was outed in the public. There was a national
04:13hashtag, not Me Too, but Mute R. Kelly, right, after Me Too came forward, you know, was made prominent. And it took all
04:22of that over all of those years to get us to the point where Lifetime did a documentary about it. And it became,
04:30he became a part of the news and then got arrested again. When you compare that with the two articles
04:37it took to bring down Harvey Weinstein, and that's not to say that there weren't people who tried over
04:42the years and there wasn't a lot of work that went into those two articles, but the moment you had
04:47had white women come forward and said, this hurts, people said, where? How? What can we do? How can we
04:57respond? This can't happen. And, you know, even in the moment, the Harvey Weinstein articles came out in
05:03October of 2017, end of September and October of 2017. In August of 2017, a young woman by the name of
05:11Jeronda Pace broke her NDA to come forward to talk about what had happened to her at the hands of R. Kelly.
05:19Nothing happened. So when you see something like that, when you, if that's your experience in life,
05:24of course, it's going to, you know, make me say, why am I coming forward? On top of a community that's like, keep it quiet.
05:30Yes. I mean, I would even add on to that, that it's so indoctrinated into our very being as
05:40femmes and as women in the black community, that when things like that happen, it's more an indictment
05:46on you than on the abuser. And so, you know, I was flying first class one day and I was, you know, so excited.
05:54I was in first class sitting next to, you know, another black woman. I was just like, oh my God, you know,
05:58there's black women, you know, doing up here in first class. And got to talking to this woman
06:04and she was telling me how she, you know, has these businesses and she does all this other stuff.
06:08And R. Kelly came up and I, you know, I brought up, oh my goodness, you know,
06:14just how we need to protect our black girls and said something about R. Kelly. And she said, well,
06:20Robert isn't really, that's, Robert's not really like how they portray him and all this stuff.
06:27I've worked with Robert. Those girls are just fast. And, you know, they were looking for money and all
06:33these kinds of things. And, and I asked her, I said, you know, so you have no sort of compassion
06:39for a young girl who lives in a neighborhood with no opportunity, who sees someone coming through and
06:45thinks they're going to give them a record deal or that maybe somehow they might change their lives
06:49that ends up in a bad situation that they now think that they asked for. It is so indoctrinated
06:55and from the church that, and I really, there's so much to say there, but it's been so indoctrinated
07:01from the church that women who go to the music industry, you know, I remember going to church and
07:09seeing these plays and this drama ties at how, you know, when you choose that worldly life, the wage
07:15for sin is death. And so, you know, a lot of that with, with the music industry, this is the reason
07:21why I feel like the Me Too movement hasn't really hit the music industry like it's needs to
07:27is because again, community-wide, we believe that some things are par for the course. Some things,
07:33you know, you're just asking for because you went down that path. When in reality,
07:39we all need, deserve to be respected and deserve to have consent and autonomy over our bodies.
07:45I was thinking in my case, I went to a predominantly white college.
07:49And so it was really difficult to kind of come forward
07:53with the fact that my assailant was an African-American man. It was almost like,
07:57you know, treasonous or traitorous to even break ranks
08:01with the community, even as I was trying to save myself.
08:05And I find that what we're talking about here is that
08:09black girls and black women are often put in the position of self-preservation
08:13or a myth of like racial unity. And we're the ones that are seen as breaking ranks
08:19or being traitorous as opposed to the person who violates us.
08:25And I don't know, I was just wondering, how do we like change people's minds?
08:30How do we get people around that to see that it's the people who are vulnerable
08:34and the people who are victimized are the community as opposed to the people who are violating us?
08:42Man, I feel like if we had, that's the magic bullet, right?
08:47It is a part of this larger work that we're doing.
08:50I've had some really amazing conversations with who we would call trolls, you know,
08:55folks who have come on my page or, you know, sent me a message saying,
09:01why do you hate black men? Why are you trying to take down black men?
09:05And, you know, why do you, you know, blah, blah, blah, that kind of tone.
09:09And then when I've had sort of took the time and it happens one in a million times, right?
09:14But I have once or twice taken a moment to say, help me understand why this singular person is the hill you want to die on.
09:23That why would you not want to say, as opposed to saying, why do you want to, that R. Kelly is representative or Bill Cosby or Russell Simmons or whoever is representative of black manhood.
09:36Why would you not want to say these individuals are not representative of what I know to be black men, how black men show up in community, right?
09:46Why would you not want to say we have to be, hold whoever it is accountable for their behavior if they are preying on our community.
09:54And so I think to answer, I don't know the answer to your question, right?
09:58How do we get them to completely change?
10:01Oh, Angelica's muted, y'all.
10:03Oh, no, sorry. I was just saying that, Tarana, I think to what you're saying and even asking that question, like, why aren't they saying that?
10:11Yeah, that should be the best.
10:13Because I think community wide, there's some responsibility.
10:16There's a reflection in a shared behavior or ideology.
10:20You understand what I'm saying?
10:21Like, I think that, again, we understand that certain behaviors have been uplifted or encouraged within.
10:27You know, you got little Boosie talking about hiring a sex worker for his 14 year old child.
10:35And so we're not, you know, those sexualizing people in those ways are considered to be uplifted.
10:42That's why when you start calling these problematic things out, they don't want to say that because some of them know, well, I was sexually abused when I was a teenager.
10:49I was having sex too early. So if that if a robber was supposed to be, you know, what does that mean about me?
10:54Well, let's ask those questions.
10:56Right. Or the other way around. Right.
10:58I think it calls their own behavior into question and things that the thing is, we have to be able to have community conversations about this.
11:06And when I say community, I mean, within the black community, I think there's a way that we have to sort of pull the curtain.
11:12This is not a public conversation necessarily.
11:14It's an internal conversation, a family conversation that we have to have.
11:18Because what happens is that there is a very real truth and a very real history of black men being falsely accused of sexual violence and of sexual violence being weaponized against black men.
11:30Black men. Right. To to to all kind of ends. Right. From Emmett Till to Brian Banks, we've seen it over and over again.
11:38That truth does not negate the truth that black women have the second highest rate of sexual violence, occurrence of sexual violence in this country behind native women, indigenous women, which is, you know, another story that's not told.
11:54But if if if that's like both of those things are true and we have to be able to there are multiple truths here when we're talking about sexual violence in the black community.
12:04And we have to be able to hold those multiple truths at the same time without making them compete against one another.
12:10And there is a way that we can talk about the real history of violence against black women using sexual violence.
12:16But we can't just have that conversation. Bill Cosby is not Emmett Till.
12:21You know, like that those making that that connection is ridiculous.
12:26And further than that, to your point that you was making, Angelica, about some of them have been abused themselves and some of them have been abusers.
12:33Right. So, yes, when you see somebody but but not up to the level of these men that we're talking about, but it doesn't matter. Right.
12:42They place themselves in there and rather than look at what accountability could look like for their role in whatever thing they did, they rather shut the whole thing now and not have a conversation about it.
12:52And we can't we cannot progress in that way.
12:55Like this whole moment has been this these last few months when we're talking about black lives matter.
13:01It is almost impossible to get people to include in that vision for black lives mattering the lives of black survivors, the lives of black women and femmes to elevate like in the course.
13:14I forgot I've read this thing. You might know this one of you might know this about how many black women and trans women black trans women have been either murdered or or assaulted in the time since George Floyd was murdered.
13:31I read something about it on the Internet recently, and I was like, it's like mind blowing.
13:36Right. But that's not a that's not a.
13:39And it's also the part of that conversation when we say me, too, is that we have to realize black lives matter, even me to all these things.
13:48I feel like a really reflective term for us to look at, because look, I want to defund the police.
13:56I want to bring less power from those structures and more powers into people who can actually respond to our community needs.
14:03But what that means is that we have to have people within our own community that can respond to those needs.
14:08So it has to be I think we have to create this culture that feels safe enough for our black man because we love you.
14:14We want you we want you so much to be a part of this progressive black community that looks at the whole a black king who can serve and protect the entire kingdom of blackness and not just the cis heteronormative parts of it.
14:29And those who can come up and stand up and say, you know what, me, too.
14:34I've been an aggressor. Me, too.
14:37I've been an abuser. Me, too.
14:40I've taken advantage of women. Me, too.
14:43I've been verbally abusive to women like and so that we could see that what that looks like is your brother and your uncle and your fathers and your husbands.
14:53It looks like there's it's a big problem. And if we don't kind of real talk about all of our experiences authentically within that, we're not going to get anywhere like Toronto saying.
15:04I was going to say that part of it is that, you know, America suffers from amnesia.
15:09Right. Like we don't remember our past and so we're always living in some perpetual present.
15:14But I also think in terms of movements, like we erase the ways in which not only do we historically erase the way in which black women have worked on behalf of and for black people's liberation.
15:27But we also sort of forget the fact that sexual violence was something that black organizers were railing against historically.
15:37So not just with the abolitionist movement and you have someone like Harriet Jacobs alongside Frederick Douglass really revealing the ways in which black women were so vulnerable to being sexually exploited as part of the system of slavery.
15:50But I'm thinking on the anniversary of the centennial of the suffrage movement, Ida B. Wells. Right.
15:56So she's we know her as an anti lynching activist. Right. But her her equation or the way in which she thought about the vulnerability of black men was tied to the vulnerability of black women.
16:08She understood that when black men were being falsely accused of sexual assault, that it was a cover for the ways in which white men were routinely raping black women.
16:17So there's a way in which sexual assaults, as you're saying, Tarana, in this moment of black lives mattering. Right.
16:24And the largest racial justice movement in the history of the country. Right.
16:29That's just numerically true that this these stories of black women survivors still are on the sidelines, even though we can see from Harriet Jacobs to Ida B. Wells to Rosa Parks. Right.
16:44To keep on to Angela. Right. The way in which like black activists have always been centering and trying to reckon with the way in which black women's bodies have been vulnerable to sexual assault.
16:54And then there have been cover ups of that violence. So I guess like that's the moment we're in.
16:58We're still trying to like push the conversation and have these conversations.
17:03But we also come from a long line of people who were doing it as well.
17:08And I hope that this moment allows us to kind of sexual violence and sexual exploitation as central to racial justice.
17:16We can't have racial justice without the end of abolition of rape. Right.
17:22So that's just one thing. But I also want to talk a little bit about the possibilities of this moment. Right.
17:28So we have like you're saying these internal conversations.
17:32And on one hand, we have a violence and a silence of these experiences.
17:37And yet we do have an opening up. Right.
17:40That the black women we have like tonight, we have a historic vice presidential nomination for the Democratic Party, the first African-American woman to be given that and to have earned that place.
17:52And then we're also having us talking about these issues right now and much more expansive notions of blackness than we've ever really seen, you know, in our liberation struggle put at the forefront.
18:05So we have Black Lives Matter. And yet we're also having say her name in all black lives matter.
18:10So there is like an opening. And I was just wondering, how do you see this? Are you optimistic about this?
18:17Are you worried that there's going to be a return to a kind of heteronormative discourse?
18:22Or what are you feeling at this particular moment?
18:25Oh, we ain't going back.
18:26OK.
18:27We're not going back. I hope y'all heard that out there for some of y'all.
18:30We're not going backwards. So we will drag you to the promised land if we have to.
18:34OK. But, you know, you know, I just I'm thinking about I think about Eckhart Tolle.
18:42I remember just in one of his early books, he talked about like since the world began, you know, we have this masculine and feminine energy.
18:49And then since pretty much the world has been in existence, feminine energy has been oppressed and male energy or masculine energy has been allowed to sort of just run rampant.
19:00And we have seen how the resilient feminine energy is and how it has still come up to lead movements from the Black Panther movements to other movements.
19:10And but what I see is that it's really just an attack on femininity and films wherever we see it.
19:18And so when you when you think about, you know, there's there's this ownership that sometimes men feel over women is this patriarchal thing, you know, and when we're walking down the streets like we owe them something.
19:31We owe them a hello. We owe them a smile. We owe them these things.
19:34And when we don't respond to them, violence ensues.
19:38And for trans women especially, it gets I've been in these situations where it gets like.
19:43You know, again, this is I want to say this to be clear, because this is like this is not about comparison, oppression, Olympics, who has it worse?
19:53What have you what this is, is that as women and femmes walking down the street, we are all vulnerable to that kind of energy.
20:02Right. The cat calling the all this kind of stuff or what have you.
20:06But there are moments that I've had and that many other trans women have had that the men are cat calling.
20:12Hey, baby, ooh, that ass or this, that and what have you.
20:16And then they wait, hold up.
20:19And they're serving your womanhood as they do in America, you know, serving your womanhood and adding up.
20:25It does it add to what I think that womanhood should add up to.
20:28And when you don't fit through that door, then it becomes an extremely violent situation because now they feel tricked just by my very existence.
20:39And so that's a narrative that then even folks who weren't in that moment, many cis women help to even encourage that narrative that somehow trans people are tricking them.
20:50When that's not it, ladies, we are as sisters, we are kind of under that.
20:56We're all vulnerable to the same energy, trans or cis.
21:00Mm hmm.
21:01Oh, that I guess people I guess it's viral at this point, the video that has come out about the three trans women in.
21:09And Jocelyn, Jacelyn and Eden the doll.
21:12And mind you, Eden the doll, you know, you see how it is.
21:15But the black girls, obviously, you know, the Eden's like she's shaking up or what have you.
21:19But she's not the one that got beaten up and laid in the street.
21:21And yet someone's you can hear them on the video talking about black lives matter where I was.
21:26I was literally just about to say that that part when I because it's so blurry, I didn't really realize that the woman who was hit, who was knocked out was black woman.
21:34And so that part of the conversation ensued.
21:36And I'm like the level, the levels of what's happening.
21:40I mean, the whole video is so horrible.
21:42But in that moment when that black man, because that's what it looked like, black man decided to even escalate even further and knock out this black woman.
21:52And then these people like it's just one thing after another.
21:56Layers.
21:57It's like sensory overload.
21:58It was so horrible.
22:00And there were black men filming it and watching who were just bystanders as well.
22:05Yeah.
22:06And women.
22:07Exactly.
22:08Then at the end you see black.
22:09So it's there's a all of this to me is a part of this family conversation that has to happen.
22:15I think a lot of times when we try to have these conversations in in concert with other issues that it gets lost, you know, and the conversation about trans folks in particular is always sort of an add on.
22:29Like, and we got to remember.
22:30And so if there aren't specific conversations.
22:34So this survivors agenda is an agenda for all survivors.
22:38Right.
22:39But we have to pull out and have town halls about specific, you know, areas and people also want they won't get elevated.
22:47It's the same kind of thinking I think that has to happen, but there aren't a lot of opportunities for it to happen.
22:52Or if you do, you're preaching to the fire.
22:55Right.
22:56The people who come are the people who care anyway.
22:58And so the dilemma for me is how do you get the message like you get the message to the people who actually need to hear it.
23:06We host a town hall like this, people who are interested in it.
23:11And we need those people.
23:12Right.
23:13We need people to be energized.
23:14We need to motivate them.
23:15They need more information.
23:16You know, we all learn from each other.
23:19But further than that, I think my concern is about how, in terms of solutions, you know, how do we go on like a hot 97, if that's whatever, you know, like Breakfast Club or you have these people who are perpetrators of harm.
23:36I know.
23:37Right.
23:38You know.
23:39That's triggering.
23:40Woo, Breakfast Club.
23:41I know.
23:42Trust me.
23:43I know.
23:44I'm saying your thing got stuck on my head.
23:49Sorry.
23:50But like we are the places that we can go and have these conversations in the sort of mainstream, if you will, for people who are not.
23:59Because those are the people who need to hear it, who we need to have, you know, have these open forums to have these kind of spaces.
24:05We, again, it's not like we're holier than thou over here and we don't need to hear it.
24:10We, I'm learning and growing.
24:12Everybody here is learning and growing from each other.
24:14But as we do this work, it starts to feel like preaching to the choir.
24:19It starts to feel like, you know, we know the usual suspects in a lot of way.
24:24And that choir, I think a lot about that and how we have been.
24:27I'm just answering the question about how do we go back.
24:30And, you know, I agree.
24:31We're not going back.
24:32And one of the things that does give me hope, I will say this.
24:35I know I sound like an old behind auntie, but the young people do give me hope.
24:39Yeah.
24:40Right.
24:41Because these kids, what I do love about these, this generation, among other things, is that there is a, there has been a normalizing of some of these ideas.
24:51Some of these, these things like, even like defunding police.
24:56Five years ago, that was a radical, I mean, it's still radical, but it was incredibly radical.
25:01Like you couldn't, you wouldn't fit in a mainstream conversation.
25:04And it's a part of everyday conversation.
25:06So I don't think these young people are going to let us go back at all.
25:10And these are everyday kids in a lot of ways.
25:13Right.
25:14Because they're kind of being socialized.
25:15So that gives me hope that we can't go too far back because the kids are not here for us.
25:19Old people, they got to kind of go, you know, get ourselves together.
25:23So I want to ask a question that may sound, I'm not trying to make it sound academic at all, but it's a value proposition question, right?
25:30Like we are here trying to say that if we center certain stories and we center certain experiences, it will lead to the liberation of black people.
25:38I think that's the, I think we all are, and then therefore the liberation of like all people.
25:43But that's a lot of, that's a number of leaps that most people have difficulty making.
25:49And so I wanted to know if we could like tease out a little bit more the relationship to like binary gender identities, right?
25:56Binary gender roles and sexual assault, as you see the way in which sexual violence reinforces it and why we need to kind of liberate ourselves
26:08from binary identities in order really to end sexual assault.
26:13Because I think that's part of like, sorry.
26:16No, I was going to say that one of the things that, you know, black women and black femmes, trans people, non-binary people,
26:27and even femme, you know, boys, gay boys, one thing that we all have in common is that we have our identity sexualized at a very young age.
26:37We have our identity sexualized before they are understood, even by ourselves.
26:44You have, you know, that's why you have the miscommunication when Zaya Wade, when the Wade's allow Zaya to choose their own pronouns and to identify how they want to identify.
26:58You got folks from our black community who think they're smart jumping into the conversation and turn it into a sexual situation or into, you know, and really just sexualizing the child too early.
27:11You see that with your, you see that with our young stars, our young black stars that are coming up, they start to get sexualized very early.
27:18It's like they're waiting for them to get 18.
27:20You see that when you got black gay boys, what happens is just like with young girls who are unattended or who, you know, whose identity isn't being sort of valued.
27:33You have people who groom those people to say, I value you, you know, over here and end up grooming people for sexual assault.
27:41So a lot of us have experienced our identities being sexualized before we've been even humanized in them.
27:50Mm hmm.
27:51Mm hmm.
27:52Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
27:54I think that there's generally there has to be kind of related to the last question.
28:00There has to be a, I want to say a reckoning, but that probably is not the right word, but there has to be an education and re-socialization or else we're going to run into similar problems just expanded, right, as we move forward as young people are coming up.
28:19Young people do get it, I think, in a way that older people don't.
28:23But that thing that you're talking about, Angelica, the early sexualization based on identity hasn't really shifted.
28:31There hasn't been a change in that.
28:33And in some ways, you know, my one of my friends runs a page called Professional Black Girl.
28:41And she's always posting, you know, it's all about joy and blackness.
28:46And without fail, every single time she posts a picture of a little black girl, maybe with a little, you know, a little top on or her midriff out or dancing to some popular song, rap song, whatever the comments are filled with.
29:05She's fast, she's da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
29:09Same thing if you have another friend who runs a, I forgot the name of his site on Instagram, but it's all black, black boy dancers.
29:17He's a dancer.
29:18And so, you know, some of them are queer and all of these comments, every time it's one of the boys really expressing their queerness, whatever, all of these comments about sex and sexualization.
29:32Of course, it sets the stage for violence to happen.
29:35What all of that does is set the stage for violence to happen early and often.
29:40And so part of our work has to be talking about that, like saying that out loud and not making it normal.
29:47There's a great another meeting that was going around.
29:51It was comparing how, you know, when the young white girl has her hair done up and has a new, you know, little dress on, she's sassy.
29:59But when the black girl has the same thing, she's fast.
30:02Like those, those dismantling those concepts, those ideas.
30:06And, and there's also a piece of this that's about normalizing sex and healthy sex and sexual relationships.
30:14In control of women's women and women being in control of that.
30:17Exactly.
30:18Like this idea that girls can't like sex.
30:22They have, you know, freak in the bed and whatever in the street.
30:26I forgot the saying, but you know what I'm talking about, right?
30:28Like this whole idea, you gotta be, you, you supposed to be hanging from the chandeliers behind closed doors in the streets.
30:34You gotta be.
30:35A lady.
30:36Oh yeah.
30:37A lady in the streets and a freak in the bed.
30:39You're ludicrous.
30:40I don't think everywhere.
30:41So I don't know how the saying goes.
30:42Sorry, mommy.
30:45Anyway.
30:46Come on.
30:47But my point is that, you know, like those ideas that sort of girls feel like they are not, and femmes are in charge of their own bodies.
30:56And they have to like, it has to be dictated by somebody else.
30:59There's so many.
31:01As well as consent, as well as consent, because I think that's one thing that we in the black community have struggled with that conversation.
31:09Because I know, I remember being a child and I'm not sure how old, but I just remember the conversation around Robin Givens going into Mike Tyson's hotel room and that whole situation happening.
31:20And so many people, I mean, so many men were talking about, well, you're going in and then women too chiming in like, well, it's four o'clock in the morning or ain't don't nothing good happen after midnight or, you know, and all these things of leading up to, she should have known better.
31:36She asked for this, all of these different things.
31:39And then to me personally, you know, as an adult getting to this space, I remember this conversation because then I remember having my own situation that I had to come to terms with because I just couldn't understand it.
31:53And I couldn't, I didn't understand that my power was taken away from me, that I didn't understand that, you know, even though I had invited this man into my home, into my bedroom, into my bed, into my body, that I still had the right to say no at any point.
32:11And, and that is the point that I think a lot of folks get was like, no, when you get a man revved up, ain't nothing you can do.
32:18I can't say no, this hurts. This doesn't feel good. This doesn't feel right for me. How can we have men who feel comfortable moving forward sexually without consent?
32:31I say this all the time that we, the conversation needs to be about consent, but more so about the right to revoke consent, right?
32:40Like, I think we talk a lot about, you can, you know, wait for the yes, and you have to get a woman to say yes, and a girl, all of this kind of stuff.
32:47And the conversation about consent is small, but the bigger conversation is the right to revoke consent.
32:53And we don't, you just laid it out perfectly. We certainly don't have that as a conversation in our community, really in many communities, but certainly in our community.
33:03I remember Desiree Washington, that's the Mike Tyson story very, very well.
33:07And I was, I forget how old I was a teenager or early college or something like that.
33:13And I remember being, repeating some of those same things, being very much guilty of that, like, well, it was one o'clock in the morning.
33:19I mean, not even realizing, I think I found out, realized later that she was 18, you know, that she was a child, essentially.
33:28So, yeah, it's, there's so much, I think conversations like this are helpful.
33:34And I think to kind of, because they help to lay out the issue, right?
33:39I think people don't often say these things out loud.
33:42We have them in backdoor conversations and talk to each other, but we need in public forums to say, we got to talk about consent and revoking consent.
33:50We got to talk about what it really means to say all lives matter.
33:53We got to lay these things out in detail so people understand and we can have really broad, robust conversations.
34:00I was thinking.
34:01I think one of the ways that we do that is by, you know, we keep choosing, as Black community, we are choosing in various unofficial ways who our leaders are.
34:12We uplift people and say, yeah, they really talking now, or that's a king, or that's a whatever.
34:17So how about this, just like HRC, the Human Rights Campaign, just like they have at least a checklist for these companies to check off to be like, okay, you good on this company, you are good.
34:30You call yourself a king, a leader in the Black community, any of that, like you can't even claim the label if you don't hit this checklist right.
34:38And what we need to start doing is revoking that title of leadership from some men who are not leading with that right mindset.
34:48So it sounds, I mean, so I want to piggyback off what Toronto was saying, because I think for our generation, Toronto, Mike Tyson's case was really definitive.
34:58I was like, and it's so weird to say this now, and I think why these conversations are so helpful, because I too was questioning why she was in his hotel room.
35:07And then it only took a couple of years later, when I was in a room with a man who actually brought up Mike Tyson.
35:15He was like, well, now I know how Mike Tyson feels.
35:17And in that moment, I knew he was going to rape me, right?
35:19So it took a terrible experience being raped in a foreign country, and in my experience, to identify with Desiree Washington's story.
35:31And then I met Desiree Washington years later, and she had changed her name.
35:35Her life was forever, ever damaged by that experience.
35:41And the fact that even though Mike Tyson did go to jail, that the vast majority of Black people did not believe what had happened to her.
35:49That's always unfair.
35:49And to bring up to your point, Angelica, we'd already known that he had admitted to physically abusing his wife, Robin Givens.
36:00And I guess what is interesting now, in this moment, too, is that we do have more accountability, right?
36:07That even though there are, or maybe we don't.
36:11Maybe, maybe.
36:11Yeah, I don't think it's there yet.
36:14I don't think it's there yet.
36:15The fact that they are, like, wanting to make Oprah the villain, because she's trying to get down to the bottom of and use her power to, like, and it's kind of sad to watch her kind of pull away from these things or do certain things.
36:28And I do also understand it.
36:30But we don't want to talk about the gradient, because if we bring up Russell Simmons, then we're going to bring up the fact that there's a lot of other people like Russell Simmons who are doing exactly the same thing.
36:41You know what kills me?
36:42It kills me when, again, going back to what I was saying earlier about, I get it six ways from Sunday.
36:51I'll probably get it more after this conversation of this idea that I hate Black men, right?
36:57Because, and it is so interesting to me.
37:02The thing that I bring up all the time is I tell them, please go and just Google from October of 2017 with Me Too and Viral to now.
37:11How many Black men have been outed, lost jobs, been discredited, disgraced in the ways that these numbers of white men have been, right?
37:23That's not the normal cases.
37:24Usually Black people who get the brunt of it or whatever.
37:27But in truth, do you know how many, if I had a dollar, even a dime for every conversation I've had with Black women, prominent Black women, who have whispered in my ear that they won't say anything, this happened, but they won't say anything because of the backlash towards them.
37:44Black women, who are prominent, successful, famous Black women, equivalent to some of those white women that came out around Harvey Weinstein, who fear retribution from our community.
37:57If they support, not even talk about their own, but if they support another Black woman survivor coming forward.
38:04We have a problem.
38:06We have a real problem.
38:07That's why I'm saying accountability.
38:09There's been, it depends on what you call accountability.
38:12I do think what Me Too has, what Hashtag Me Too has done, and I make a distinction between Hashtag Me Too and the Me Too movement.
38:20What Hashtag Me Too did was galvanize people.
38:23It brought this issue to the forefront.
38:27And similar to this 100-year anniversary of white women gaining the right to vote, it gave a lot of white women voice and a lot of white women space to talk about this very serious issue.
38:39And also similar to the past time when white women get an opportunity, it creates a tunnel for other women, Black women, women of color, other people to come through that.
38:49So as a result, yes, we have more visibility, we have more space, but the accountability is not spread evenly.
38:58And I would argue that even the accountability we've seen is only a minutia, am I using the right word?
39:05A little bit of what needs to be, of what needs to happen.
39:11And so that's why I think, like, I'm really excited to be in this conversation because the example you gave is that partial, partial opening for Black women leads to such a wide opening for some of the white people.
39:25That if we actually had a wide opening for Black trans women and girls, right, we had a wide opening for those of us who are most vulnerable and who are most likely to be ignored and marginalized in our social justice movement, how wide the freedom would really be for all of us, right?
39:42So I just want to say that when we, you know, I firmly believe that when we center those who are the most vulnerable amongst us, we all will be free.
39:49We, you know, referencing the Con Behave River Collective.
39:53We're going to, oh, sorry, go on.
39:56No, no, go ahead.
39:56No, I'm just saying, just, just, just, just talking to the point that we're talking so that we're not sometimes talking in that echo chamber or speaking to the choir.
40:04This is where I have for years been calling and yelling into the, open to folks like Essence, like the NAACP, like many of our Black publications that people look to.
40:19And I know that I've been faced with resistance.
40:24It's, we're just now having these type of conversations in these last couple of years.
40:28But I know like behind the scenes, folks are like, well, Essence Fest is not ready for that conversation yet.
40:33Or, you know, we, we can't put that on the main stage just quite yet.
40:36So we got to, like, stop hiding our hands and, like, sort of talking about how we grow, how we, exactly, and how we talk about our stories.
40:51And now how we're opening to talk about that, because I have a dream.
40:53I have a dream, I have a dream, literally, that we can return to this notion of Black pride that blends our Blackness with our spectrum of identity and sexuality.
41:09And the ways in which, you know, like how the pride parades took their liberation.
41:14Well, they don't know nothing if they ain't seen the Black pride, a full Black pride, where everyone's invited to the ball.
41:22Where we, where everyone, you know, we can get into, like, Pose.
41:25The reason why, I mean, again, a show like Pose that has been critically acclaimed by all these other people, but not by BET, not by the NAACP, not by our own.
41:33You know, so it was just, it took moments just like this with Essence back in February to, like, honor us for the Black women in Hollywood, you know, situation.
41:44But, you know, you can call a girl for the cover, too, honey.
41:48Just saying.
41:49Well, thank you.
41:51So we're going to open it up.
41:52Thank you so much.
41:53I think that's really beautiful to say.
41:57And also, I do believe that, you know, I'm impatient at this point.
42:03I mean, Black women have been talking about these issues for so long.
42:06And statistically, for every 15 Black women that are sexually assaulted, one feels comfortable coming forward, right?
42:13So I don't think we have any more time to waste to, you know what I mean?
42:18Like, we expect Black women to suffer silently and to down this trauma in order for everyone else to feel, to walk up right.
42:28And I actually think it's time for us to say, like, our time, it's our moment.
42:34And our freedom will liberate you.
42:37It's not about us competing with each other.
42:39It's about our freedom being necessary for your freedom.
42:43And I was thinking, Tarana, with this question of, I mean, the idea that you hate Black men.
42:47I mean, these are such, like, you know, it's like when white people say, like, do you hate white people?
42:52And you want to respond in kind, no, I hate racism.
42:56What do I feel about this issue, too?
42:58No one hates Black men.
42:59I hate patriarchy.
43:00If you have a particular political project, then we have a problem.
43:05But if you want to be free and be free alongside me, then we're family.
43:10So I just want to say that.
43:12I had a man say to me, yeah, and I had a man say to me once, I was actually speaking on an NAACP town hall, and he was telling me how he felt, he felt a little intimidated by these words that we were using.
43:29And he was like, you know, I feel turned off, basically, when I feel like y'all hate men.
43:34And so when you're talking about toxic masculinity, you know, he was like, you know, you're just, you know, talking about that men are bad.
43:40And I was like, OK, well, what I want us to get to a point is to understand just the basics of the dictionary, that there's a word toxic and there's a word masculinity.
43:50They don't belong together.
43:53Right.
43:54No, you know what?
43:55A hit dog will holla.
43:57That's what the old folks say.
43:58That's what my grandma said.
44:00And there is a way in which I've seen accountability take place where a person is, you know, called in, as we like to say, about it, and they say, OK, that's not my understanding of it.
44:18That's why I thought around Kobe Bryant's death and how people went after Gayle King so horrifically.
44:25And I thought to myself, have they even read Kobe Bryant's statement?
44:30No.
44:31You know, the statement that he put out?
44:32These men who were railing against and calling, I was like, Kobe Bryant himself, I don't know who wrote it, but he represented it, put out a statement where I've not actually seen a public figure even use that much accountability.
44:48And he didn't say, I did it.
44:50He said, I now understand why she came to the conclusion she did, although that wasn't my intention.
44:56We don't even get that much from any of these people.
44:59Even in that situation, like you said, he made a statement.
45:03And the problem with that was years later, I'm talking every black man that I know that was coming up was saying he didn't he didn't do it and like did not acknowledge he made a statement at all.
45:13So that's the problem that happens is that when there's no turn in character that says now for the rest of my life after this moment, I'm going to stand on the pedestal to talk to other black men to say, this is how we need to treat our women.
45:27Because I once got myself into rocky territory and I don't want that to ever happen again to me or to any of you.
45:33But because we're not talking about that boldly and it was it's like a press thing that went under the rug.
45:39Everybody just equaled that up to he never did it.
45:42But you know what what you just described to and I know we had to go take questions, but what you just described, part of this is about courage.
45:51Right. And integrity, because no, it doesn't feel good to be called out.
45:57No, it doesn't feel good to be accused. But if you can stand in that and do what you said, which is I'm going to say, you know, I'm going to be accountable for this.
46:05But in addition to being accountable, I want to do the work of maybe trying to help use myself as an example to hold other people, show other people what accountability can look like.
46:15That discomfort then turns into something powerful.
46:18Your momentary discomfort turns into a tool that can help other people.
46:23The problem. And I see this not this is not just black men, right?
46:26This is folks, people in general. I say this to corporate people all the time.
46:29If you would stand up and say, I did this wrong.
46:33We went about this wrong. I see now the error.
46:37And I know people are tired of apologies, but I say it all the time.
46:41Apologies are not work. They perceive work.
46:44But you give people the space or the grace to set that up, to set that work up by what how they come forward and present themselves.
46:51What you described, if we could even get that kind of relationship happening in community, I think that would be a big win.
46:58So some of the questions that we've received so far are about accountability and the ways in which black women have very little recourse when it comes to being able to go to the police.
47:14They are not believe, they are less likely to believe, they are less likely to have their cases prosecuted.
47:20One person has written in about going three times and now their case is going forward.
47:25So I guess, you know, as we're having these really complicated and important conversations about police accountability, police reform, defunding the police, prison abolition.
47:36What do we say to black women survivors who are trying to have accountability, whether we've been talking mostly about accountability within the black community?
47:46But in lieu of that kind of accountability or alongside that kind of accountability, black women still have difficulty getting any accountability from the state itself.
47:56And so I just want us to there are like two or three questions around maybe a good opportunity to to talk to these specific survivors in our audience here who want to be taken seriously by the state in order to seek some form of justice.
48:14I, you know, I feel like I don't have good answers because what they are, what they are describing in these comments and what their experiences are, are so many of us have the same experience and the, you know, there aren't a lot of solutions to get the police to behave in the ways that we want them to get them.
48:38You know, there's, you know, there's, you know, there's a backlog in rape kits, there's no, if we're talking about like, you know, taking away from the idea of defunding police, whatever, just the system that we actually have in place is so deeply flawed and it gets exponentially worse when you get into communities of color.
48:55And so, you know, I think that's part of the reason why we talk about alternative forms of accountability and, and separating ourselves from using or thinking that you can find justice or accountability through, through legal means and through, you know, law enforcement and states, the state run institutions, because they have failed us time and time again.
49:19It's another reason why, again, why, when I, when I say that this national conversation about state sanctioned violence and police violence has to include a conversation about sexual violence, we don't talk enough about that fact that, that, that sexual violence is that, you know, police brutality, excessive force is the number one complaint against law enforcement in this country.
49:42Number two is sexual violence, right? It's the second highest complaint against law enforcement in this country. And if we know that's true, we also, what we also know is true is that black women and women of color have the highest instance of interaction, negative interaction with law enforcement.
50:00So if you put those two things together, so if you put those two things together, then you have a Daniel Holtzclaw, the police officer who was convicted of raping, what, eight black women, you know, so those, those are realities. This is not like putting together a family equation.
50:13Convicted of eight is not supposed to be anymore.
50:16Yeah, he was convicted of eight, but they were like 13 or something. Yeah, so, and we don't even know about the ones that didn't come forward. But the point is that it is, it is, we have to think about alternative forms of accountability.
50:27And sometimes that, and, and, and, and shifting the idea, you know, this is why these like serials, these, these, these TV shows that we have that in 40 minutes show you this perfect picture of what it is to be a survivor and how you get justice.
50:42And that's just not real. It's not our reality. Right. And they, and they skew people's idea of what's possible as opposed to creative. We have to create new ideas of what's possible.
50:53And, and, and honestly, you can probably talk to so many survivors who actually did go through a process, had their perpetrator arrested, you know, went through a court process and all the rest of that.
51:05And here, the, the, the re-traumatization often happens, the, the anguish that they feel, and at the end of the day, not getting healing from that process.
51:18And so we lean heavily on a model that, that centers healing so that people can not be dependent on outside forces like law enforcement to find that level of accountability and become whole against.
51:29I would also add that the truth, even though it's, it can be very tricky and scary and all those things. I, to get kind of biblical, the truth can set us free in the sense that even if we're looking at stepping away from traditional systems of law and punishment of law enforcement.
51:49One thing that I know is probably one of the worst punishments for people sometimes is for other people knowing what you did and, and, and, and, and, and that constantly being sort of, because those who are sex offenders who have to register in neighborhoods and do certain things, you know.
52:07So it's like, even as a, as a trans person, as a person who, you know, had to come out as trans or to, let's just even use that, for example, me coming out as trans and telling that truth, I was met with a lot of resistance.
52:21I was met with a lot of pushback, violence, even a lot of things.
52:27So no path, I believe, especially to healing and to truth is that just, just because it sounds great, doesn't mean it's going to feel good.
52:35And so I feel like, but if we wrap ourselves in truth, um, both victims and abusers and all that, I think that's where the healing comes from because there's so much power in the truth.
52:47That is why black trans women continue to be killed is for their truth that they hold in their body because they also hold someone else's truth that they're not willing to claim and hold onto publicly.
52:59And so with these women as well, with cis women as well, you know, there is such a truth in what happens in our experience.
53:06And if we so like radically reject the denial of our experience and of our truth and are radical about saying it anyway, about speaking up anyway, even though, and knowing that there are folks like Tarana and myself and a many other group of black women who are going to wrap ourselves around you when you do speak up, when you do come forward, we have to create those support systems.
53:29So we're out of time.
53:30So we're out of time.
53:31So I want to thank you both for an amazing conversation.
53:34And I guess Tarana, we want to end with the survivor's agenda.
53:38Um, there are questions here about, you know, whether people will, we have political candidates speak to the fire, um, to have this as part of their, um, platforms.
53:49Or how will we get, uh, survivors or gender or me too, like you just said, as part of black lives matter that we're, we're on the streets with the same intensity and the same fever when black women are raped by police officers or black women are raped within the community.
54:06So those are two different questions, right?
54:07Like one's like legislation and, and what, what do you see this?
54:12Yeah.
54:13So the survivor's agenda came out of, um, our original, our original effort around me to vote there.
54:24Right.
54:25Those of us that the, the national women's law center, um, the national domestic workers Alliance and farm worker women and myself, that's, you know, the, the groups, the leaders of those groups.
54:37We were so frustrated by watching the, um, the debates and the, and this, and me too being, and sexual violence being one of the biggest topics of the decade, not even of the last couple of years.
54:50And it not be a prominent part of folks platform.
54:53Um, and so we wanted to bring, you know, to, to identify survivors as more than just this group of pitiful people who need your support.
55:03Cause that's always how we're painted is what are you going to do for us? What are you going to do for us? And, and they, you know, we want more services and we want bigger budgets, which is true, but we'll also, we are a constituency.
55:13We are a body of people that cross every single demographic that you can think of, and we have power and it's at that power is inherent in our survival.
55:22And we can use that power to do, to, to, to see the changes and affect the change that we want.
55:28And so the survivors agenda is, was crowdsourced, um, both with people, everyday people who took surveys to tell us what they want to see in an agenda, in an agenda. What do you want? But the agenda is both.
55:41I like to think of it as external and internal. On the one hand, it is an agenda that's, that sort of shows what the field is, who, who the people are, um, who are doing the work to end sexual violence and what the survivors want, who we are as survivors and what we stand for, what we want this country to look like, what we want, how we want people to see us.
56:03We want people to see us and, you know, what our needs and demands are as survivors. And it is a tool for politicians, for organizations, for, for influencers, for people, change makers to pull from to when they are doing things like creating policy, but also when you are talking about your organization and you're talking about what is the, the direction our organization is going to go in.
56:30You should be pulling from this agenda to say, we have to make sure. So if you're doing work around education, there should be a component of your work around education that deals with sexual violence. And we have a solution for that in this agenda.
56:44If you're doing work around transportation or housing, you know, housing and security, if you're doing work around law enforcement, all these kinds of things, we want to say that there's a, this is a thread that runs through so many different parts of social, um, social justice work.
56:59And this agenda is an offering from the people who have actually survived too many, too often.
57:05And the people who go sit in the room, who, if they are survivors, they put their survivor on a back burner.
57:11And if, and if they aren't, they are making decisions for people whose lived experience they have no idea about.
57:17And our lived experiences are so vastly different that it takes a number of us to come forward to talk about what it is that we need.
57:24So I'm very excited about the agenda. It's the first of its time. I'm very excited about the number of voices. It's not just the usual suspects. It's not just the people that we see and hear all the time.
57:35It is a wide swath and cross section of people, human beings from across this country who have unfortunately, um, had to, to live with being a survivor of sexual violence.
57:48So I'm going to end here. I just want to say on behalf of rape survivors, um, everywhere, I'm so excited to have the survivor summit, um, occur.
57:58And, and if you are all interested in having more of these dialogues and participating in more of these conversations, please register for the survivor summit at www.survivors.com.
58:11Um, Tarana, your light has gone down. So I think this is, I think it's time for us to leave. I think we're supposed to be going on to another.
58:19You look great though. You look amazing.
58:21I keep trying to get closer to the camera cause the sun is.
58:24No, I feel good. I think, you know, we're, um,
58:27I'm honored to be in this conversation. It's a historical night for many reasons.
58:31I think we're also making history here by continuing to have these conversations.
58:34And, uh, you know, let's go on to the other conversation and watch history being made on the grand stage.
58:40And, uh, on zoom. Okay. Or, or in television.
58:43Can I just say, thank you, Angelica so much for, for joining us and being a part of this conversation and making this a much more robust conversation.
58:52And I hope we have some more.
58:54I mean, thank you just from the moment that I met you, thank you sir, for being open and being inclusive from the beginning.
58:59So I appreciate that.
59:00Thank you both. And I'm again, honored to be in this conversation.
59:04More work to be done.
59:06You're welcome.
59:09Okay. Bye everyone.
59:10Bye.
59:11Bye.
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