YouSaid · the spoken record

Tarana Burke

lines on the record: 43
first: 2021-09-15
most recent: 2021-09-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I remember we had a church ministry some years ago for survivors of sexual violence, and they said, we're going to do a practice around forgiveness. And they said, you know, you have to forgive in order to move on. And people were talking about forgiving their abusers. And I said, I've never thought about forgiving my abuser because I didn't blame them. I mean, I hated them and I felt strongly about them, but I didn't necessarily blame them in a way where I needed to eventually had to go through a process of sort of understanding and then forgiving. But initially I thought, this is all me.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It is. When you were talking earlier about it's the act, right? There's the actual violence, but the violence that happens after it, particularly if you're”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I don't, you know, I have found ways to forgive that and to say, I get it now because the love, the longing for the love is that feeling is so hard to fight.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had been in a situation in my life, and I read it in a book where the man was chosen over me, where I felt like my stepfather, who I had a long relationship with that ended well, but started really, really tumultuous. I just felt like my mom chose him over me. And I knew what that felt like. And I could not. Okay, sorry, I could not fathom. This early. The child wasn't even born yet. I wanted to be intentional. The word I use all the time when people say, oh, you did such a great job with your child. What did you do? And I said, I didn't know what I was doing, but I made sure that the ideas that I had in my head, I was very intentional. I was intentional about who I exposed them to, where they lived, what I did. And it started in that moment. It was I have to do better for this baby than I did for myself. I have to.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know what it looks like. And quite frankly, this whole thing about the lineage, right? And it was what I had seen in my home, around my home. I thought the fights that we had were normal because I had seen that kind of violence around me. And it's like, you know, in the 80s, we had the burning bed. If it wasn't a burning bed situation. Like, that's what abuse looks like. This is not abuse. This is just a fight. Also, that need to when you want to feel good, part of feeling good is being loved, right? Somebody loving you makes you feel like you're a good person. And so I desperately wanted that. And he just wasn't the person.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I thought I was gonna die, but I certainly thought it was gonna be a battle royal that he had. I was pregnant. So, you know, you read in a book, we had fought before and I thought that was normal at the time. But now I couldn't fight because I was pregnant. And so I thought I might lose my baby. I might, you know, I don't know how this is going to end, but he was so far gone that it was so scary. It was just incredibly scary.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I felt it probably before that moment. I think that moment was a realization no matter what I do, I can't run from this. Can't run from when there is an injustice, there's a part of me that has to speak to it, that has to react, has to respond. And no matter what you try to do, this is a part of who you are. And I think that moment also solidified that for me.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have the right word, but it was such a big moment for me because I'd like to play the background. It kind of goes back to the ugly thing. I didn't like to be in the spotlight. I didn't want to be the one on the microphone. I didn't want to, you know, be noticed too much, but I would write the talking points, you know, or I would coach the person going on stage. I wasn't that person. And that helped me come out of another, you know, reveal another layer of leadership for me. It was great.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just didn't feel like people were moving and responding enough there was, but just as my hyperness. But it was, again, Ms. Sanders who allowed me to go on this stage in front of my school and really on television in front of media to talk about not just Rodney King, but Latasha Harlan, who had been shot. And I just thought we have the power. And it was my moment of sort of taking what 21st century had given to me and bursting on the stage, right? And saying, we have the power right now to do something. We are leaders. We need to speak to this. We need to do something right now. This is unacceptable and we get to say it's unacceptable. And I just felt it was such a...”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, another big moment. I'm in college and I had been in 21st century. So we had done organizing. I've been organizing since high school. And, you know, New York, we had our own moments with Yusef Hawkins in the Central Park Five.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going around and touching everybody and giving us the fire. And it was, I was in love really and truly. I just fell in love. And it felt like a saving grace. And it was. It was very much a saving grace.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going through something, or I had other stuff. I had my brother had been killed. I have been dealing with other life events. And we, a lot of us are just angry. And it became, I don't want to say cool because that's kind of cliche, but it just became acceptable for to be that young and that angry. And so the city's teenagers who our age dancing and drums and jumping on chairs and singing and boys and girls, right? Singing out loud and laughing. And I was like, what is this corny nonsense? You know, like at first, that's the New York and us was like, this is corny, what are they doing? But it was also like my heart was quickening. Who are these kids? This is amazing. And then Ms. Sanders came out and she just was nothing like I'd ever seen before. She just was a ball of fire and all of that fire she was willing to share. And like it was like she was.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because besides what happened to me, I think people don't also realize in a lot of inner city communities, urban communities, there's a bunch of young people who have a lot of the same trauma.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was everything. It was a new, it was almost like I can shift identities. I was so busy trying to be good and good wasn't working. And high school kind of blew that out the water. And then I found this work and I thought, oh my goodness. And when I speak, people listen. And these people, these adults are telling me I'm a leader right now. Not you can be, but you are a leader right now. And you will be in the 21st century. And it just clicked for me. And I thought, I want to put everything into this. This is going to make me whole again. You know, and it didn't, but it was definitely part of the work.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, not until I was much older. I just thought this is what girls from the Bronx do. This is how we are. We're just, you know, we fight. We have attitudes. But I thankfully read so much too that I had another sort of worldview. And I had this political worldview that was forming. And I think it just made me ask more questions and ask more questions. And as I met people and started thinking more about it, I was much older when I realized, oh, that acting out, all of those things, this is clearly coming back to this one, these series of events.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I have a sign book by her. You're right. It does say that. I didn't realize that, but that's what I felt. And it was so revealing to me. This was another big shift for me because I thought, as I said, how does she manage that? I know that this doesn't go anywhere. At least it hasn't gone anywhere. So can these two things exist at the same time? Can I feel actual joy at the same time that I'm feeling all of this pain? I don't understand it. And I just became a little bit obsessed.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then in high school, when I write this in the book too, when I heard her voice and made this connection to this real person who I had, you know, I'd read her books and I could recite her poetry and I felt like I was a little arrogant about that, but her voice was the second shift. It felt like she was light, right? She felt lighter. She felt joyous. She felt Comfortable and her skin felt wise. All of this I'm hearing in her voice. She was laughing. And I just thought, how? All of these years that I, from when I read the book to when I heard her voice, I thought we have a secret, right? I know who this is. I know what this is like, we have a secret. And I had been like on a fake it till you make it kind of thing. I'm like, well, I'm just going to pretend to be really, really good.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I read it and I just, I could not believe what I was reading. I also didn't really understand my Angela as a real person. She was just a person in a book. So I was just like, oh my God, there's somebody else. Somebody else, I just couldn't, I just remember reading it and rereading it. In fact, I read that chapter so much. That when I reread the book later, I was like, oh, I don't even remember these parts.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It already happened. And I, being, you know, whatever. I was going to say fast, but I'm trying not to say that, but I snuck into the book.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I could shout every day for the rest of my life because it's also why writing a book has always been important to me. Not that I could ever even try to begin to do what she did, but the Feeling of I loved reading. I love books. And you know, I say that in there. But the feeling of picking up a book, not knowing what to expect.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meanwhile and want to help the world and want to go out and change things that you have to do some self-work before you can tackle that. And she called me on it, not even intentionally, right? She just believed me. She said, oh, you love me? Well, this is what I think love looks like. It looks like you holding space for me. And me being able to unburden myself of this thing that I've been holding. And I was like, oh, didn't really prepare for that. I'm sorry. And it just ripped me apart. But I also not enough to make me have like an epiphany in the moment and say, please child, let me help you. I just was like, I can't. I'm so sorry.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The outside, exactly heaven. And, you know, people ask me all the time, I've never met her again. I've never seen her again. But this child was so much like me. It reminded me so much of myself, except that I didn't have as much freedom as she had, a sense of freedom that she had at that age. And I didn't have a person that I trusted the way she trusted me. You know what I have to remind myself often is that I was 22. My child is 23, right? I keep that as a sort of gauge. And I was a kid who was trying to figure things out, who was just starting to kind of deal with or think about the things that had happened to me. And here was heaven believing me. I said, I love you and I'm your family. And I want to make you a leader and I want to help you. And I meant those things, but I think I hadn't done enough of the work. I think this is the truth for a lot of people who.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened to you We would pay more attention to what happened and dig into that, then I think we can make better lives for children and give them earlier pathways to healing”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And can I just say it was what I recognized in the girls that I started working with. Walk into a space and I walk into a school and I would ask the counselor who the girls that you're about to suspend? Who are the girls that have detention all the time? And it'd be these angry girls who'd be fighting all the time, cursing. And other teachers would look at them and say, oh, these girls are just, they're just so bad and they just can't. And I'm like, these are children. Children are not inherently bad. Something happened.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what it was. The shame, I found a new way. You know, the shame was eating me alive and made me. unworth And the rage gave me a sense of power. And so I leaned into the rage, but it certainly was the shame manifested as rage. It was not useful rage. I believe in righteous rage. But this was not righteous. It was not useful. So no, it definitely didn't become something good. I had to learn to get over that. You know, it was just another thing to be like, oh, this is not really helpful. This is not helping me. And I don't feel good. Again, I can get angry. I can have fights. I can yell and scream and curse people out. And then I go home and cry. I feel terrible for days and a time. So that's not useful either.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will never really understand her decisions, right? And some of the decisions she made, but I understand what drove her to have to make some decision, whether it was right or wrong. I've been in that place. And like I said, I had the desire to be the best mom ever. I had the desire to make sure my child was free and liberated and had this wonderful childhood, but I didn't have the capacity because I hadn't dealt with my own trauma. I was still carrying shame. I was carrying forth the things that I had learned from my grandma, my mom, and you know, so I had to unpack that stuff. Honesty really was my honesty and a real deep. Just longing to make sure that my job had a different life was what helped me to face that stuff and say, oh, I see what the problem is here. I just don't know how.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. My mother hasn't read the book yet. And I know I intend to have her read it soon. I'm going to give it to her next week probably. I've just been so nervous about it. But because I want her to be clear, I know it's going to be hard for her to read and hard for her to hear some of the things that I'm saying. But I also put that other piece in there because I want her to know that I get it now.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She knew. She knew. I can tell in the shift that she put it together like a puzzle really quickly. And that's what I'm saying. I think older black women in particular, they've contributed a lot to the trauma that we've carried around the sexual violence, but I also know that they have so much wisdom and they have so much experience that it's just brought them into a different understanding about survival than we have.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the hope that, and some of this is problematic for me, right? Because I thought it's too late to save myself, right? It's too late to do anything for me. But I could stop other little black girls from feeling what I felt if I could intervene earlier, if somebody had come to me at 12 and said, it's not your fault, healing is possible, any of those things, it would have changed the trajectory of my life. It just felt like the most important thing in the world to be able to try to do that for other little girls.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“here we are and here we are that that just it means so much to me because i think my life's work i know my life's work has been directed by”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it up yeah It would be such a shift in culture if we could talk about it honestly. And I think that's really what I wanted to do in the book is talk about this honestly so that we can have at least some way have better conversations in our community about it. And it's not, obviously, it's not just the black community, right? In communities of color, though, we have a particular shroud of secrecy and shame. And I think it falls under the others because we have so many other things that we're dealing with. And I also think that's why a lot of our mothers who are trying to make ends meet, get the rent paid, deal with whatever their relationship stuff is. It's like, I don't have time to try to figure this out for you. And I'm trying to survive myself.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't know what to do if you're not. If something does happen to you, I don't know what to do with that. So you just go have to do what I did. Figure it out.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that happened to you matters. And the reason why that's important is because whatever happened to my nana, made my nana try to figure out how to protect my grandma. And my grandma, whatever happened to her, made her try to figure out what protection looks like for my mother and so forth and so on. But there are no examples. There's nobody doing the work of interrupting sexual violence in our community. People don't see it as a social justice issue, right? And there's all of these questions and shame around it. So there's just, there hasn't been any work, significant work to dismantle that and to unpack it. And so you have these mothers, particularly these black mothers. may come out in ways that calm us and traumatize us but i think at the heart of it it really is about i just want you to be safe”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's passed on though, and I try to articulate this too about my mother. And it's a sense of protection, right? We know, I think culturally, you said something in your book, what happened to you, which I'd love as well, just have to say this one question when you say this is why I've known and I've always known this, that everything matters.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I just was, it just became a dark place because I was confused about I want to be good in the world. I want people to see me as good. Life was okay. I was a good girl. My family liked me. And now what do I do? If they ever found out how dirty I was and how bad I was, they wouldn't love me.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it started with being molested. I was seven years old. And, you know, I think a lot of, particularly black girls have this similar experience of knowing right and wrong because you kind of get bits and pieces, right? You don't sit on anybody's lap. You put some clothes on when a grown man comes in the house. All of this kind of stuff that tells you that. We are responsible to protect ourselves. And so when that happened to me, it just turned me inside out. And I thought, oh, I'm really bad. There must be something about me that's bad that made this person do this to me. And even at that age, I didn't even think something was done to me. I thought I was complicit in that abuse that we had done something bad. This person and I had done something bad.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With so much aggression and vitriol. And it was so, and I was just like me, me, was he talking about me? And it made me equate ugly with badness too, right? And that just, it just was this question in my mind. I was a very inquisitive child already. And so I just kept thinking, what is ugly? I don't even really understand what it means, right? You see a monster on TV and that's clearly meant to be ugly, but Like in people, I look like my mother. I didn't think my mother was ugly. It just was really strange to me, but it sat heavy on my chest. And I started to like children do, make it make sense with all of these other things. And that was just the beginning of a really, really, really long and hard period in my life.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was I used to think of all the time I was about 12 and I went to the pharmacy to pick up something for my mother and there was things simultaneously happening right I was dealing with a whole bunch of stuff in my 12 year old life and I really wanted to be good I just always wanted people to see me as good and a good girl and I behaved myself and I was having a conversation seven or eight you know a younger girl than me and I thought to myself that the father was weird but we had this lovely conversation as we're moving along the line I said bye to the little girl like okay bye she said bye and then I heard them I heard the little girl in the line say oh daddy doesn't she look like Amaya like you know I guess somebody in their life And this grown man, I'm a child too, right? Oh, nah, she could never like Amaya. That girl is ugly.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely thought, you know, if you can't beat them, join them. But just fundamentally, I don't understand unkindness because it's just not necessary. Like, you don't like the way I look.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See myself, and I don't feel any type of way, right? I'm like, hey, you're a cool person. But the world has told me different over and over again. And so over time, I understand the historical significance of that as a black person. I understand the cultural significance. I understand pop culture. And I intellectually, it makes sense, but it doesn't change what it feels like, right? Dealing with the abuse that the violence and abuse that I dealt with as a child, I let that become the reason I just married all that together. Oh, this must have happened to me because I look differently than everybody else or because people just find all of these different ways to keep telling me I'm ugly. And if you don't like, I never could understand unkindness. It seems really naive to say to some people. And I've been unkind very many times in my life”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took a lot for me to get to that because there's a part of me that has to confront that reality. My reality, you know, I have a very close circle of friends, lovely people who have been my friends for 20 and 30 years, and your friends hold you up and they say things to you all the time, like you're beautiful. Stop it. Don't say that. Don't talk badly about yourself. And I look in the mirror and I don't see. I see something that looks fine, right? I'm not maybe, you know. supermodel, but it's okay.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's been interesting. It's been a whirlwind. It's been life changing. It's been stressful. It's been a lot of things.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, it feels like a lifelong process in some ways. Certainly the process of writing this book is the hardest thing I've done, the hardest piece of work I've ever produced. Spend the last four years have been Saying whirlwind, but I think I need a different word. It's hard to describe what it's like to have your Work sort of put on the front pages of all the newspapers and just blast across the whole world, but then also have people not really understand it.”
2021-09-15 · Oprah's Super Soul · Oprah and Tarana Burke - Part 1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source