Ai-jen Poo: So how are you, by the way?

Tarana Burke: I’m OK. I have become one of those people that I used to talk about, now — I am a plant person. I went from the person that killed plants to having like, 75 plants in my house.

Poo: Are you serious? 75 plants?

Burke: No, I am that person. I do. It sounds crazy, like I have a jungle, but they’re spread out. I have really little ones; I have big ones. So that’s my relaxation now. So I have like, an app on my phone.

Poo: Ohhh, you’re a plant lady.

Burke: I’m a plant lady now.

Poo: This is amazing.

Burke: Yeah, I’m really excited about it.

Poo: I mean, of all the things you could be doing.

Burke: That’s what I’m saying. [laughs]

Poo: We are going to put a pin on that and come back to that. We’re overdue for a catch-up, on so many levels.

Burke: Yeah, clearly. [laughs]

Poo: But today, we are going to talk about hope.

Burke: It feels like that word just washes over you, right? [laughs] You hear “hope,” it’s like, oh, that’s a good one — ah.

Poo: It’s a good word. It’s a really good word. And when I was just thinking about, preparing for this conversation, the reason why I wanted to do it with you is because there are just so many layers of hope that you bring to the world and to people like me, to survivors, to all kinds of communities that you have no idea. [laughs] But I wanted to just explore that, because I don’t know how much you’ve really thought about that. And, well, what I thought at the beginning of this year was like, everybody was so tired from last year and the four years before that, and kind of traumatized and dealing with so much loss from COVID and all the disruptions in our lives. And there was a way in which people entered this year, it felt like from a place of doom and gloom. Like everybody was being really negative about elections, really negative about this administration, really negative about so many things, and I just thought, this is not going to work. [laughs] This is not going to work out for us, and this vibe is not a winning vibe.

And so if we are going to do what needs to be done, this year or any year, we have to figure out how to channel hope. And so I just decided at the top of 2022 that I was going to be militant about hope and cultivating hope. And so that’s where I am, is like, [laughs] we have to channel it, we have to generate it. And one of the things that I thought about in preparing for this conversation with you, is just the fact that you and I are of the same age, same generation, and we never knew each other, really, in New York, even though we came up —

Burke: I know, and we’d come up around the same people.

Poo: The same people, the same generation, the same movements, the same mentors. [laughs]

Burke: It’s so interesting.

Poo: It’s so interesting that our first conversation was after I was 45 years old, in 2018. And one of the things that made me so hopeful about that is you became one of the most important people in my life, overnight in ’18, and I went from my whole life without being in any kind of relationship to you, and imagine … Like, that makes me hopeful, because there are probably other incredible souls who will change your sense of what’s possible and will change your life in such beautiful ways, that are still out there, that we have yet to meet. You remind me of that. So that’s another one of the reasons why I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Burke: That’s such an incredible sentiment. But I do — I feel like that about our little group in general. Like, that became — and even just all the things that happened. Nobody — I don’t want to say “nobody”; that’s such an exaggeration. But it was just so hard to do this work, and it always felt like an uphill battle in a vacuum. And it would always be — the winds would always be little blips on a map that felt good to us, and it felt good to survivors. And we always had to try to make them feel bigger [laughs] than they were, to try to generate hope, to try to generate more hope to keep people in the game and keep them moving forward, while trying to mitigate our feelings of feeling this “how do we continue to do this, and how do we continue to generate the energy to keep going, when we know we have so far to go and such a mountain to climb?”

And then 2017 came like lightning, and it was like, wow, not only is this possible, but it’s sort of like when you kick over an ant farm or something, or you kick over —

Poo: And you’re like, whoa! [laughs]

Burke: You’re like, oh, shoot, that’s not just — there’s like, thousands of us. There’s millions of us. It was not just like lightning struck, but then you found all of this community. That was — you talk about finding hope, it was like, I feel like that about not just the way that moment happened, but there are several moments like that, but certainly finding community in the work that we do was big. Big, big, big, big, big. As I say this to you all the time, I could not have possibly made it through the last four or five years without our sisterhood. No way possible. No way.

Poo: Same. Same.

Burke: Yeah, no way possible.

Poo: It was an era of some of the biggest transformations, in the world and in ourselves, and there was no way we were going to do it without each other — [laughs] just no way.

Burke: No. No. Just, yeah, no. [laughs] People could never understand — no.

Poo: That’s right. I’m curious about — you mentioned — I think that that is so true, the way you’ve described it, of our whole job has been to help small groups of people break out of the isolation of their experience, or individuals — individual survivors, individual domestic workers — break out of the isolation of their experience, find community and connection; then we build these small communities of connection.

But then we know that there’s millions more people out there, and sometimes, for years, it can feel like a tree falling in the wilderness. Like, this group may have built community and found each other, and that is so important, and it’s a miracle in and of itself — and it isn’t what we need, if we’re going to disrupt the status quo and build something different.

Burke: Exactly.

Poo: We need it to not feel like a tree falling in the wilderness, but actually …

Burke: All the trees falling. [laughs]

Poo: All the trees, all the trees. And I’m curious, in your journey, what the role of hope has been in that process.

Burke: It sounds corny, I guess, when you say it, because people have made — have watered it down and I think overuse it, and I think it didn’t help that it was Obama’s slogan, [laughs] you know? But it really is the driving force. It’s all we have to keep going, because this work is just so hard, and the — what we are trying to achieve is so big. And we don’t have any idea — [laughs] you know, you get a big win or you achieve — you move the needle a little bit, you impact the narrative, whatever the thing is. You get this big, huge thing. Your work goes viral, [laughs] right? And you’re like, my gosh, that’s incredible.

You can only hope to have that kind of impact, right? I remember very, very clearly that day of writing down my hopes for this work in a notepad, in a steno pad. I had zero dollars, [laughs] both personally and to put towards this work. I had zero connections in the world. I had my community, I had the people around me, but I knew clearly that it had — I could see sort of the writing; like, what would it take. I knew that I had to get a bigger platform. I knew that different people than me had to talk about this, people who other people listened to. So I knew that. I remember the names that I wrote down, of like, celebrities and things like that that I wished would talk about this. I knew that I was moved by Oprah’s story and listening to her talk about it, so what if she did this? I knew — like we would use Gabrielle Union and Mary J. Blige and all these other people, in school, in our classrooms, to tell their stories. I could only hope to get people like that interested in telling their survivor stories and dealing with little Black girls. But you just keep doing it, hoping that you can get somebody.

So our whole setup is like, 90 percent hope, [laughs] you know what I mean? And that is that you can work hard enough, plan big enough, just — you do all the work, and then you just really, really, really hope that it’s good enough, important enough, big enough, strong enough, all of those things. And you’ve got to keep that sort of in front of you. And that’s it. The rest of it is just the work. You’re just working, working, working, working, working, working, working, and hoping for a miracle.

Poo: I love that formula. It’s like: Do the work, plus hope, equals miracle.

Burke: Exactly. [laughs] Exactly.

Poo: You know what that makes me think about is the fact that you were, long before the viral moment, you were already thinking about, like a true organizer, like, what if Gabrielle Union did this? And what if Oprah did this? And what if — and kind of connecting those dots. And to me, there is something so powerful about the creativity of hope, and that if — it’s the base or the root of how we as organizers are able to be creative. If you are cynical and you are negative and you don’t believe that winning is possible, there’s no way to be creative. And the kind of creativity that’s required to address any of the problems that we’re dealing with, it’s just like, extraordinary. So I just, it’s that relationship between hope and creativity I feel like is perfectly illustrated in your example just now.

Burke: You know what’s so funny? When I look back — I have this box of stuff, right? And I have in this box — so I was about 28, 29 when I first started getting into this, and — which is obviously a fully grown adult. But now that I’m almost 50, I’m looking back at that as like, a kid. [laughs] But I was just like, I was certainly hopeful and optimistic and not cynical, because I was writing letters to these people. I would go online and find the record label or the so-and-so —

Poo: [laughs] This is amazing.

Burke: [laughs] And so I have these letters that I wrote to Fantasia, Queen Latifah. I still have copies of the letters in my little folders, because in my mind as an organizer, it made sense. The issue made sense, their connection to it made sense, and it’s like, if I can just get them to — just get this information in front of them, clearly they’ll want to engage in this thing. But I didn’t hinge — that wasn’t my strategy for the work; it’s like, that’s an extra thing. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, but I would send this stuff out to people, and I would — hoping that they would one day connect to it. And that’s actually how I got — we got, early on, Essence invited us to come to Essence fest and set up in their community tent or whatever because I just used every connection I could.

I definitely knew pop culture was a part of the answer to growing this movement into something that — it needed to be connected to my culture in some kind of way. I did not understand or even think it was possible to be what it is now. Social media wasn’t around in that way, so I couldn’t understand this as a thing, but I definitely knew pop culture was part of the answer. And I just — it really was.

I just think about the hopefulness of youth and just like, that it’s really important to hold onto that, that level of hopefulness. And I try really hard not to lose — completely lose that, because as we get older and cynicism sets in a little bit —

Poo: You know too much.

Burke: Yeah, [laughs] you know too much, which is why what happened in the last five years blew me away, right, because over time, where I started — I had long since stopped trying to engage celebrities. And where I started with ‘me too’ and just sending out the letters — I had long since stopped doing that. That was 10 — you know, by the time ‘me too’ went viral, it’d been 10 years. So those things were not [laughs] remotely a part of my strategy anymore. It had become a concrete program, and we were organizing in a totally different way, and that was like, part of the early, early, early version of the work. So it was like, look at this — [laughs] this is where we started.

Poo: Well, that’s another thing that makes me hopeful, which is that — I was just having this conversation with one of the cofounders of the Domestic Workers Alliance, who was a nanny and is now an organizer at NDWA, and she directs our Black organizing program. And she was saying, 15 years ago — we’re celebrating our 15th anniversary this year. Can you believe that?

Burke: It’s amazing.

Poo: She was like, 15 years ago, when we started this thing, there is no way we could’ve seen what would’ve unfolded or where we would be and all the people we would be connected to.

And that, to me, is so hopeful, because everything that we are today never showed up in a strategic plan, right? [laughs] It never — and it means that there are these dimensions of possibility that we can’t see or plan for, which to me is hopeful.

Burke: Because hope is like a seed. Yeah, hope is like a seed. I really feel like at the height of it — wherever you are in life. I don’t think it’s just about youth. I think when you have pure, unfiltered creativity — what you were talking about, the creativity that hope makes possible. And it is, it really is. That excitement I had, the letters I was writing, that came from a very pure place. It may have been naïve, [laughs] but it definitely came from a pure place. I really thought just from the urgency of the issue, that that alone would make these people interested. And come to find out, it did, later, but I thought my lonely [laughs] self in Selma, Alabama, could write a letter that would make it through all of these channels and get to them.

But it did — I do believe that that planted a seed, that that hope is like a seed, and it planted it somewhere in the universe, and that was nurtured over time, and it gave birth to a thing, eventually. I really do believe that, and I think that happens in all kinds of ways. And that’s why hope is important, because it doesn’t manifest — you know, it’s not like a Chia Pet, right? [laughs] Just put it in — [laughs]

Poo: I wish it were. Could we get some hope Chia Pets going? [laughs]

Burke: [laughs] I know. You know, you’re not going to water it in five days and have the thing you — I mean, maybe for some people.

Poo: The miracle!

Burke: Right, some people. But for the most part, I think, you have to believe it in your heart at some point. And I think there was some part of me — even if we left that alone as a strategy — not from a cynical place, but from a practical place more so, because I don’t think working on that as a strategy for 10 years would’ve been practical, either — but left that alone from a practical place, but not from a — I didn’t leave it alone in my heart, that this was something that was necessary. I just had to move on to what was practical and what was right in front of me and deal with what was there. But that seed was out there. And it was like, left in the wind to come to fruition.