ABSTRACT
Scholars and activists alike have called out its failure to include Black and other women of color, and its inattention to racism and other structures of oppression. Almost immediately following Alyssa Milano's viral #MeToo tweet, Black feminists rushed to point out that Tarana Burke had actually created the MeToo movement in 2005 for survivors of sexual violence, focusing in particular on young women of color. The intersectional problems range from individual omissions to collective exclusions to racialized state violence. The continuing legacy of criminalizing Black men, pointing for example to the Central Park Five, would make it political unviable for Black women to turn to a deeply racist criminal justice. The past two decades have seen a growing critique of the criminal justice system, the exponential growth of prisons since the 1980s, and prison populations made up disproportionately of people of color.
