“For the first time in my life, my story was completely out of my body. And I had finally told it to the one person who needed it the most: myself.”
Tarana Burke

So much of Tarana’s story reflects a reality I witnessed as a young girl in a low-income neighborhood by the Provo River. Her stories thrash and rip through my memories, forcing me to feel that smallness, that powerlessness, and the confusion of being a young girl; the powerlessness I witnessed in my friends and myself.

Oh how this book made me cry and yell and shake my memories from my eyes. Tarana’s writing is bold and painful as she tells the silenced stories of girls and gives voice to so many women. But then she talks about race. Tarana explains why race and this country make her experience different from non-black girls; she claims that black girls’ stories are not like white girls’. And I believe her.

The devastating effects of slavery pervading this country are too often held within the hearts of black girls and women. Tarana taught me that. Thank you, Tarana, for your courage. For your anger. For telling your story, it’s yours, and it’s ugly and beautiful and carries the weight of a cruel history and corrupt systems, but now it is also our nation’s story. Thank you for exposing yourself, and by doing so, exposing a country that needs changing.