I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
Everything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality – the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.
Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?
Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most – is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?
My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
But my first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible – the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.
I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.
Most people were good people if you just treated them well.
The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities – in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal.
For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal. I.
The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.
It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
Studying in countries like China isn’t only about your prospects in the global marketplace. It’s not just about whether you can compete with your peers in other countries to make America stronger. It’s also about whether you can come together and work together with them to make our world stronger. It’s about the friendships you make, the bonds of trust you establish and the image of America that you project to the rest of the world.
The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.