Though she is best known as the founder of the #MeToo movement, which got global attention over the past decade, Tarana Burke has spent her life fighting for justice. In addition to her work with sexual violence survivors, she protested police brutality in the ‘90s as a young college student. But the demonstrations that emerged in the summer of 2020 in response to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murders felt different. “[It] felt like the world was reaching out,” Burke says in an interview with TIME. “The world was connecting. Because not only is this a systemic issue, it's a global issue.” Now, five years later, Burke reflects on what has happened since the protests, and why 2020 is part of a continuum in the fight for racial and gender justice—past, present, and future.
What do you remember from that moment in May five years ago when you learned about what had happened to George Floyd? Could you walk us through what was going through your mind at the time?
Tarana Burke: By 2020, the onslaught of public executions of Black people had become a sort of regular feature on social media. So I had made a practice of not looking at videos anymore. [George Floyd’s murder] wasn't big national news right away. Some friends said, “Have you seen this video of the guy who had been killed?” And I was like, “No, I don't want to watch those videos.” And they were like, “No, you have to watch this one.” So I did, and when I did, I remember the most distinct part was him crying out to his mother, which made me immediately turn it off. I was just undone. Similar to Mike Brown—that image of him in the street has left an indelible mark on my brain.
The aftermath of these events in 2020 led to a massive summer of change. How did you react? Did you participate in any protests after that?
Burke: 2020 was huge, but I always put it in the context of Ferguson in 2014. Sometimes it feels like we live in two Americas. There's Black America, where things that happen in our world feel totally consuming. And you don't realize until you speak to people outside of your world that they have no context for it, or they don't have any connection to it.
2020 is a continuum to me. What I know is that organizations that were largely responsible for 2020, like the movement for Black Lives Matter, never stopped. So it wasn't mass organizing. It was local organizing. It was strategizing to get politicians in office—that kind of thing. So, watching [the protests] in 2020 was a beautiful moment for me as a student of the civil rights movement, as a student of justice movements, to see this thread continue, as sad as it was that it was on the backs of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I think people have become so accustomed to a hashtag going viral and a new, quote-unquote, movement is born—and then it goes away. So people know that Black Lives Matter came, and then they feel like Black Lives Matter dissipated. It did not.
So I was excited. I did a lot of strategizing and connecting with folks to make sure things happened during that time. I have a child in their 20s and a nephew, who were both very active in the streets. It just made me feel like so much more was possible.
In 2020, you told TIME that you've been protesting police brutality since the 90s. What felt different this time?
Burke: I think watching people make the connection from police brutality to larger systemic issues of racial inequality and injustice. When we had Amadou Diallo, or Abner Louima, or Eleanor Bumpers, and the numerous other cases that happened in the 90s and in the late 80s, it felt isolated because there was no social media. It was very New York-based in my mind.
With George Floyd, it felt like the world was reaching out. The world was connecting because not only is this a systemic issue, it's a global issue. There's a way that the United States—I see this a lot in sexual and gender-based violence—places itself away from the world. As if the things that happen in other places can't happen here. And when they happen here, they're not systemic. They're just these isolated issues. So watching this become a global issue was much different from what my experience was in the 90s. You had all of these people really seeing that the militarization of police is not good for anybody.
Looking at the moment from the vantage point of 2025, where do you think we are in the fight toward racial equity in the U.S.?
Burke: My perspective is broader. Because I think that from a narrow perspective, it's a sh-t show, right? Things are terrible. And I think that any type of justice work at this moment feels perilous. However, I also understand that we don't just live in the moment. That's why I'm always talking about the arc of movements. Movements are long. People mark the civil rights movement from ’54 to ‘68 because that's the height of it. We talk about Brown v. Board of Education to Dr. King's death. But there are other things that happened way before Brown v. Board, and there were things that happened after Dr. King's death. The Fair Housing Act was passed in ‘68, which is after King's death.
The Black Lives Matter movement carries that torch. The seed that was planted is being carried by organizations doing racial justice work in this country. So from that perspective, I know there is a ton of work happening. And what I also know is that movements outlast moments. That's number one.
Number two, you can't do this work without a practice of hope. I firmly believe that evil and injustice are not sustainable. America has been pretty consistent in trying to keep these oppressive systems in place. But what's also been consistent is resistance. I don't know if one outweighs the other, but I think it's a constant battle of oppression and resistance.
The third thing I'll say is that when people are dying, particularly in a battle, I think they fight harder. They fight dirtier, and they fight to try to save their lives. I think that architects of the things that we're seeing right now that feel so inhumane, so cruel, so unjust saw the writing on the wall 30, 40, 50 years ago.
They knew that there was no way to keep this country purely white, that it was going to continue to get more and more brown. They saw that there was no way to keep people's lived experiences suppressed. So we were going to get more and more queer. People are smarter as time goes on. And the smarter you get, the more free and liberated you want to be. You can't stop that. So no matter what they do, the future of America is going to be brown and wrapped in rainbows.
Fighting for social change is an endurance sport. How do you stay motivated and galvanized in this moment?
Burke: I really love Black folks. I do. Every part of me; every fiber of my being. I love people. I love humanity. And I'm really grateful that these were the cards I was dealt. This was the life I got to live. I'm motivated, and I'm kept hopeful by watching just how, despite all of the stereotypes or clichés, we stick together. When these moments come, when it gets really, really hard, we're able to turn to each other. Those kinds of things make me feel hopeful. I'm moving into a different stage of my life. This stage of my life may not involve me being in the streets the way I was when I was 20, 30, or 40. But there's a place for me. There's a place for what I have to offer.
Your life changed in 2017 when the #MeToo movement gained widespread attention. But you had been doing this work for years. What was your experience of suddenly being in public life?
Burke: I was 44, I think, when #MeToo went viral. Being a middle-aged Black woman who had spent most of my life behind the scenes in movement work, being thrust into the public didn't have value for me personally. It wasn't a goal of mine to be a known person. So I had to find the value in it because everybody was just like, “This is great. This is the moment.” But one of the best parts for me, and especially in relation to what we're talking about, is that I can't even calculate the numbers of Black women and then survivors overall, who have come to me and said, “I was able to confront that I was a survivor because of you.” “I was able to talk to my mom.” I just had a woman tell me this yesterday. She was able to talk to my mother, auntie, and sister about both being a survivor and what happened to them.
So you have these survivors literally across the globe, and we still are connected. A lot of the work we do is to move the narrative away from people who cause harm to people who've experienced harm, and how we stop that harm from happening. So my experience being a public figure has been largely dedicated to that.
There are so many parallels to BLM and #MeToo exploding at similar timelines. Talk to me about those. How is the fight for gender justice intrinsically linked to racial justice?
Burke: I think a lot of Black women hold [the same issue], which is, are you Black first or are you a woman first? And having to deal with the struggle of that question. When Black Lives Matter exploded, there were actual tangible things for people to see. There were bodies in the street. There was video footage of these horrible acts that were happening. We had this motivating evidence for people to become active. The difference is that when #MeToo went viral, it started with celebrities, but then the virality of it was people. Everyday people who just shared their experience. But it was not connected to something that people could see.
The MeToo hashtag going viral was a moment for women to be recognized—even though survivors are across the gender spectrum, but largely women—and seen for this trauma that they've been holding. Similarly, when Black Lives Matter went viral, it was this moment for Black people to be like, yes, this is police brutality, and this is what's happening in America around racial injustice. But there's an intersection here that we're not talking about. If you're a Black woman, you can experience both police brutality and sexual violence. The number one complaint against law enforcement is police brutality. The number two complaint is police sexual violence [according to 2020 Penn State study]. So, if the number two complaint against law enforcement across the country is sexual violence, and Black people are being harassed, where do you think that intersection lies? That means that Black women are harassed by police. Look at the cases that we've seen in the public: Daniel Ken Holtzclaw, the police officer who was convicted for raping 13 Black women. We've seen evidence of this. That's not a conversation.
What do you want to tell younger generations who want to follow in your footsteps when it comes to activism?
Burke: Well, the first thing I would tell young people is to look for my mistakes. Look for the inconsistencies. Look for the places where you think I should have showed up better and didn't. Look for the places that stand out to you. Build on what wasn't done. Build on what's left over. Activism is not mysticism, and we're not superheroes. I wake up every day trying to do the best I can. I try to learn a little more, push a little harder, grow a little bigger. I hope I succeed at that. And I also hope that young people know that I love and root for them, and I want them to lovingly check me.
Trust yourself. Maybe that idea doesn't quite work out. But it's okay. Young people, particularly young people of color and particularly Black children, need to learn [that they] can fail forward. Trust your gut. Trust your instinct. Trust your heart.
Organizing also does not have to be mass movements like 2020. Organizing can be you and three of your friends meeting after school to talk about how something is affecting y'all. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. You don't always have to be the biggest voice in the room.
What is the importance of activists banding together across generations?
Burke: I don't think there's anything more important than intergenerational connection. I'm Gen X, so those of us who have been doing this work for 30 years have learned [from that]—just like I learned from folks in the civil rights movement and Black Power movement that we need to pass on. You're not going to learn it in sound bites, clips, and quotes on the internet. You need to talk to people. You need to stand side by side, walk with me, and learn from other generations. Conversely, those of us who are still doing the work have to pay attention to young people. We have to hear them and understand who they are. This is the whole point of why we started doing this. I think sometimes older people see [young people] as like this invisible group in 2099, and we'll never know them. No, they're right here. This wisdom has to live with somebody. And we need fresh wisdom.
This project was created in partnership with the Center for Policing Equity.