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Your Suffering is Your Bridge

Keisha-Gaye Anderson

I had a sinking, sickly feeling in my stomach as I turned the corner that morning to move my car. I’d barely slept the night before because I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. That tattooed face and neck, those wild and angry eyes, the string of violent threats that shot from his mouth like a blow torch. He had the look of a man who might do anything at any moment, and who would also get away with it. 

As I walked to the middle of the block where my car was parked, I saw my fear realized. All four tires had been slashed. That sickly feeling in my stomach quickly shot up to my throat and I had trouble breathing. Just 24 hours before, that same angry white man physically assaulted my husband–unprovoked–as he exited our car, in broad daylight, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The angry man ranted about how our car was too close to the tools he was using to fix his motorcycle, which he’d left in the street (our car was nowhere near the tools). 

He threatened my husband–who was too shocked to retaliate–by telling him he had a gun. And the man’s last threat told me everything I needed to know about how to process the altercation, and what to ultimately expect. He kept yelling at me to go look up some group he was a part of. “You’ll see….” he warned and then screamed at me, “Get out of here!” and flashed his hand like he was swatting away a fly. 

I went home, locked the doors, closed the curtains and sat in a cold puddle of memories that had previously been securely locked away during my childhood in Southeast Queens, NY. We had heard about the Black family whose home was set on fire nearby right before we moved there from Brooklyn. I remember Black boys I had grown up with who’d been chased, intimidated, and sometimes beaten up by mobs of white boys. I had seen more than one Black boy shot by police right in front of me. Bill Moyers, who I would later work for as a journalist on his show NOW With Bill Moyers, had produced a whole documentary on the racist violence in the neighborhood where I grew up (“Rosedale: The Way It Is,” 1976). My experience wasn’t unique or special, but it was incredibly painful. And this experience brought it all back. I had a full fledged anxiety attack.

When I calmed down enough to Google the group the angry man told us he was a part of, I learned it was a biker gang that didn’t hide its love of white supremacy, which had also been implicated in a broad range of criminal activity. At that moment, I knew absolutely nothing would come of his attack, even after reporting it to the police. And I thought about something James Baldwin said in a 1963 KQED interview for the program Take This Hammer: 

“I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. I know I was born, I’m gonna suffer, and I’m gonna die. And the only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else. Anything else. I learned this because I had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well he’s not necessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. So I give you your problem back.” 

Yet, in the 61 years since this interview aired, we haven’t been able to give this invented boogeyman back to its creators, and it remains our problem, like an immortal virus. And even as it’s rebranded with terms like ‘woke’ or ‘urban’ or ‘DEI,’ this caricature used to justify why someone feels threatened or needs to use excessive force on people who haven’t done anything to them is still embedded in the psyches of so many Americans. It is still something that can easily extinguish a life, with no consequences.

The names of the casualties of this hate masquerading as fear have filled memorials and monuments across the country as reliably as the changing seasons. And even though the world has gotten smaller because technology has allowed us a real-time window into all the ‘worst things about’ this life anywhere on the globe, there still exists a need for this boogeyman, for an ‘other’ that someone small minded can terrorize so that they feel big. Whether it’s England, France, Minnesota, or Tennessee, the virus can suddenly flare up, and then destruction follows. 

I wonder if the particular shape of this kind of terror and violence that has become like an unwanted rite of passage for Black men, and for Black people in general, will ever be unnecessary for the people who inflict it? As Baldwin also said in a conversation with Nikki Giovanni in a 1971 interview on the TV show Soul!: “You go through your life for a long time, you think that no one has ever suffered the way I’ve suffered…and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you. Your suffering is your bridge, that many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you and always will, and all you can do is bring hopefully a little light into that suffering, enough light so the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering and begin to live with it, and begin to change it, to change the situation. We don’t change anything. All we can do is invest people with the morale to change it for themselves.”

Do people who need a boogeyman know they are in fact suffering, in fact living in a delusion created by their own extreme fear of self-reflection, self-acceptance? Can they cross that bridge and rejoin a collective of humanity that recognizes that we are all small and grasping and afraid, but less so when we work together for the things we all want and need in a society hell bent on using superficial physical characteristics as a control mechanism? 

Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps I expect too much. “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people,” said Baldwin.  I just know that willful ignorance is louder and more grating to more people than it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Gen Z gives me a lot of hope, with their compassion and intellectual curiosity. I also know that there is no more time to not know the worst things about this life when the accumulated knowledge of humanity is literally at so many people’s fingertips via a smartphone or the internet. 

There is no more time to ignore the virus of anti-Black, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist delusion because you think it doesn’t directly affect you–it does. There is nowhere else to go on this earth but in circles. There are no more things to own, there is now only to see and understand why you came, and accept that there are others here who are not going to cease to exist just because you don’t like the idea that they exist. We can walk in circles or take a spiral staircase to a better experience of each other, but we can no longer feign ignorance. Our political landscape, our environment, and of overall health are finally buckling under the weight of willful ignorance and hate, and it’s our collective problem to fix. Sink or swim together.

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive,” said Baldwin. “To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” 

All we can do is hope to survive the next angry man who needs to create a boogeyman as proof of his own life, and hope that more optimists will be willing to really see the worst things about this life so that they contribute to the fixing and healing of a virus that, if ignored and allowed to fester, will definitely explode.

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Keisha-Gaye Anderson

I had a sinking, sickly feeling in my stomach as I turned the corner that morning to move my car. I’d barely slept the night before because I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. That tattooed face and neck, those wild and angry eyes, the string of violent threats that shot from his mouth like a blow torch. He had the look of a man who might do anything at any moment, and who would also get away with it. 

As I walked to the middle of the block where my car was parked, I saw my fear realized. All four tires had been slashed. That sickly feeling in my stomach quickly shot up to my throat and I had trouble breathing. Just 24 hours before, that same angry white man physically assaulted my husband–unprovoked–as he exited our car, in broad daylight, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The angry man ranted about how our car was too close to the tools he was using to fix his motorcycle, which he’d left in the street (our car was nowhere near the tools). 

He threatened my husband–who was too shocked to retaliate–by telling him he had a gun. And the man’s last threat told me everything I needed to know about how to process the altercation, and what to ultimately expect. He kept yelling at me to go look up some group he was a part of. “You’ll see….” he warned and then screamed at me, “Get out of here!” and flashed his hand like he was swatting away a fly. 

I went home, locked the doors, closed the curtains and sat in a cold puddle of memories that had previously been securely locked away during my childhood in Southeast Queens, NY. We had heard about the Black family whose home was set on fire nearby right before we moved there from Brooklyn. I remember Black boys I had grown up with who’d been chased, intimidated, and sometimes beaten up by mobs of white boys. I had seen more than one Black boy shot by police right in front of me. Bill Moyers, who I would later work for as a journalist on his show NOW With Bill Moyers, had produced a whole documentary on the racist violence in the neighborhood where I grew up (“Rosedale: The Way It Is,” 1976). My experience wasn’t unique or special, but it was incredibly painful. And this experience brought it all back. I had a full fledged anxiety attack.

When I calmed down enough to Google the group the angry man told us he was a part of, I learned it was a biker gang that didn’t hide its love of white supremacy, which had also been implicated in a broad range of criminal activity. At that moment, I knew absolutely nothing would come of his attack, even after reporting it to the police. And I thought about something James Baldwin said in a 1963 KQED interview for the program Take This Hammer: 

“I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. I know I was born, I’m gonna suffer, and I’m gonna die. And the only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else. Anything else. I learned this because I had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well he’s not necessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. So I give you your problem back.” 

Yet, in the 61 years since this interview aired, we haven’t been able to give this invented boogeyman back to its creators, and it remains our problem, like an immortal virus. And even as it’s rebranded with terms like ‘woke’ or ‘urban’ or ‘DEI,’ this caricature used to justify why someone feels threatened or needs to use excessive force on people who haven’t done anything to them is still embedded in the psyches of so many Americans. It is still something that can easily extinguish a life, with no consequences.

The names of the casualties of this hate masquerading as fear have filled memorials and monuments across the country as reliably as the changing seasons. And even though the world has gotten smaller because technology has allowed us a real-time window into all the ‘worst things about’ this life anywhere on the globe, there still exists a need for this boogeyman, for an ‘other’ that someone small minded can terrorize so that they feel big. Whether it’s England, France, Minnesota, or Tennessee, the virus can suddenly flare up, and then destruction follows. 

I wonder if the particular shape of this kind of terror and violence that has become like an unwanted rite of passage for Black men, and for Black people in general, will ever be unnecessary for the people who inflict it? As Baldwin also said in a conversation with Nikki Giovanni in a 1971 interview on the TV show Soul!: “You go through your life for a long time, you think that no one has ever suffered the way I’ve suffered…and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you. Your suffering is your bridge, that many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you and always will, and all you can do is bring hopefully a little light into that suffering, enough light so the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering and begin to live with it, and begin to change it, to change the situation. We don’t change anything. All we can do is invest people with the morale to change it for themselves.”

Do people who need a boogeyman know they are in fact suffering, in fact living in a delusion created by their own extreme fear of self-reflection, self-acceptance? Can they cross that bridge and rejoin a collective of humanity that recognizes that we are all small and grasping and afraid, but less so when we work together for the things we all want and need in a society hell bent on using superficial physical characteristics as a control mechanism? 

Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps I expect too much. “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people,” said Baldwin.  I just know that willful ignorance is louder and more grating to more people than it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Gen Z gives me a lot of hope, with their compassion and intellectual curiosity. I also know that there is no more time to not know the worst things about this life when the accumulated knowledge of humanity is literally at so many people’s fingertips via a smartphone or the internet. 

There is no more time to ignore the virus of anti-Black, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist delusion because you think it doesn’t directly affect you–it does. There is nowhere else to go on this earth but in circles. There are no more things to own, there is now only to see and understand why you came, and accept that there are others here who are not going to cease to exist just because you don’t like the idea that they exist. We can walk in circles or take a spiral staircase to a better experience of each other, but we can no longer feign ignorance. Our political landscape, our environment, and of overall health are finally buckling under the weight of willful ignorance and hate, and it’s our collective problem to fix. Sink or swim together.

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive,” said Baldwin. “To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” 

All we can do is hope to survive the next angry man who needs to create a boogeyman as proof of his own life, and hope that more optimists will be willing to really see the worst things about this life so that they contribute to the fixing and healing of a virus that, if ignored and allowed to fester, will definitely explode.

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