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On the Limits of Globalizing Black Feminist Commitments: "Me Too" and its White Detours

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ff.2021.0047

2151-7371

Shireen Roshanravan,

Race, History, and American Society

On the Limits of Globalizing Black Feminist Commitments:"Me Too" and its White Detours Shireen Roshanravan (bio) Tarana Burke, a Black cis woman who grew up in the Bronx, New York, developed the politics of saying "me too" while working to address the sexual violence that Black girls and women experience in their families and larger Black community. Burke was inspired to create the "me too" campaign when a 13-year-old Black girl she calls "Heaven" became close to her at a youth camp in Selma Alabama and eventually disclosed to Burke her experiences of sexual violence. "When she disclosed," Burke recounts, "I rejected her" (Ohlheiser 2017). As she sent Heaven to talk to someone else, Burke anguished about her incapacity to say the words "me too" in affirmative recognition of Heaven's experience. Heaven never returned to camp. Burke then began work on a campaign focused on the power of saying "me too" to other Black survivors. She describes the politics of saying "me too" as "empowerment through empathy." The empathy Burke describes, however, does not require erasure of the other to enable identification in the ways Saidiya Hartman's critique of empathy suggests it might. Rather, this empathy shatters the isolating fictions of individualism embedded in cultural messages that survivors of sexual violence should be ashamed because they have only themselves to blame for what happened to them. The "me" in Burke's politics of "me too" calls forth a communal sense of self in solidarity against long histories of institutionalized sexual and racial dehumanization in Black community. Bernice Johnson Reagon traces this Black feminist epistemic politics of the collective "I" in Black freedom songs of the civil rights movement. She documents how the use of "I" in songs like "This Little Light of Mine, I'm gonna let it shine," purposefully uses the first person "I" to declare a self in communal solidarity with other freedom fighters (1991, emphasis mine). To declare "me too" in a community for which the state and public anti-violence movements cannot register as protector is to issue a commitment to witness faithfully the violence [End Page 239] experienced within that community, to hold oneself accountable to stopping the harm, and to back up the survivor's resistant intentions. In Burke's words, it is to say "I agree with you. I am with you. I understand you, and I'm connected to you" (2019). It is important that both the "I" and the "you" in these statements are other Black survivors of sexual violence and not the criminal justice system or "women in general." The declarations of agreement and understanding are not the imperialist "me too" that assimilates another's experience to one's own, discarding the parts that do not fit one's familiar frame. The power of "me too" is its commitment to see and believe Black women and girls. To say "me too" in this Black feminist campaign is to signal collective solidarity and affirm different realities of sexual violence otherwise dismissed and silenced within and beyond Black community. When the white cis Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano tweeted a call for survivors of sexual violence everywhere to post, tweet, and otherwise publicly state "#MeToo," Burke's Black feminist communicative politic detoured away from intersectionality and community-based transformative justice. Milano claims she did not initially know that Burke was the originator of the "me too" campaign against sexual violence when she issued the call for the hashtag #MeToo on social media in response to the high-profile accusations of sexual assault against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Burke describes her reaction to the social media mobilization of her work: "When it first went viral I thought, Oh my God, my work is going to be erased" (2020). As young Black women called on Milano to acknowledge Burke, she did bring Burke into the national conversation as the originator of the campaign turned viral public transnational movement. Nevertheless, Milano's social media translation of Burke's "me too" from its Black community-based origins to an abstracted public in general has meant a loss of Burke's Black feminist campaign's focus on the communal. Instead, Milano re-issued...