Black Voters Matter, the Georgia-based voting rights and community empowerment group, had an unlikely partner at a get-out-the-vote event held Tuesday in Atlanta: Me Too International, the global movement to end sexual violence.
While I’ve always thought of all quests for justice as somewhat related, I’d never considered the deep intersectional relationship between the movement for racial and political justice, and the effort to pursue justice for survivors of sexual violence.
But Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, made a strong case at the voting event.
“You know, people talk about violence in communities, and they always leave this issue out. We talk about gang violence and gun violence and other forms of violence, but sexual violence is a form of violence that plagues our communities,” she told me, adding, “Particularly Black communities. And we love to call on Black women when it’s time to save the democracy, when it’s time to vote. But Black women are the second-largest group of survivors in this country. So if we are going to call on Black women to save the democracy, we have to start addressing the issues that affect Black women.”
Cliff Albright, a co-founder and the executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund, explained later that the power dynamics and oppression present in racism are the same ones present in patriarchy.
This is true. All oppression is about the creation of a human hierarchy — whether by race, religion, gender or sexual orientation — with those at the top of it exerting control over those below them.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who was once raped in jail after being arrested while trying to integrate a Whites-only lunch counter, said in a 1971 speech:
“Now, we’ve got to have some changes in this country. And not only changes for the Black man, and only changes for the Black woman, but the changes we have to have in this country are going to be for liberation of all people — because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
I would argue that Burke is a modern version of Hamer, and her words ring just as true.
Charles M. Blow is a New York Times columnist.