Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive

264 Pages·2014·0.463 MB·English

by  June Jordan

Life as Activism
June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive

Life as Activism
June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive
Edited by Stacy Russo
Litwin Books
Sacramento, CA
Copyright June Jordan, dates indicated in the text.
These pieces were originally published in The Progressive magazine.
This compilation was published by Litwin Books in 2014.
Litwin Books
PO Box 188784
Sacramento, CA 95818
http://litwinbooks.com
This book is printed on acid-free, sustainably-sourced paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan, June, 1936-2002.
Life as activism : June Jordan’s writings from the Progressive / edited by
Stacy Russo ; foreword by Angela Davis ; preface by Matthew Rothschild.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A complete collection of June Jordan’s columns for The
Progressive, published between 1989 and 2001”-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-936117-90-1 (alk. paper)
1. United States--Civilization--1970- 2. United States--Politics and
government--1989- 3. United States--Social conditions--1980- 4. African
Americans--Politics and government. 5. Jordan, June, 1936-2002. I.
Progressive. II. Title.
E169.12.J6567 2014
320.97309’04--dc23
2013050956
Table of Contents
Foreword vi
Preface ix
Editor’s Acknowledgements xi
Editor’s Note xii
Finding the Way Home 1
No Chocolates for Breakfast 4
Waiting for a Taxi 7
The Dance of Revolution 14
Where Is the Rage? 17
Unrecorded Agonies 20
Wrong or White 26
Mandela and the Kingdom Come 31
Diversity or Death 34
In the Presence of Giants 38
A Chance at Grace 42
Intifada, U.S.A. 44
Requiem for Sara 46
The Big-Time Coward 50
A New Politics of Sexuality 54
Thomas Was Not the Point 59
Can I Get a Witness? 61
The Fire This Time 66
Toward a Manifest New Destiny 72
Valentine’s Day, 1992 85
Requiem for the Champ 87
The Light of the Fire 91
Willing and Able 95
This Time I’ll Vote 98
On the Night of November 3, 1992 101
Islam and the U.S.A. Today 106
I Am Seeking an Attitude 109
The Truth of Rodney King 115
Bosnia Betrayed 122
Freedom Time 125
A Good Fight 130
Give Me Two Reasons 135
A Powerful Hatred 137
We Are All Refugees 143
Innocent of What? 147
Where I Live Now 150
Where I Live Now, Part Two 153
In the Land of White Supremacy 156
Manifesto of the Rubber Gloves 159
My Mess, and Ours 164
The Street Where I live 166
Stories of a Visitor 171
Justice at Risk 173
Where Is the Sisterhood? 178
Eyewitness in Lebanon 183
Not a Good Girl 186
For Clinton, With Disgust 189
A Gathering Purpose 191
The Stoning of Bill Clinton 194
O, California! 196
Breast Cancer: Still Here 198
From the Kosovo Series: First Three Poems 203
From the Kosovo Series: Next Three Poems 206
Good News of Our Own 209
The Hunters and the Hunted 214
A Letter to Maria 221
New Year Poem 225
The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage 228
Scenario Revision #1 232
Do You Do Well to Be Angry 234
Bibliography 239
Endnotes 243
Foreword
Published during the last decade of the twentieth century, these columns
remind me just how much June Jordan’s formidable voice is missed today. She
was a poet, but also equally a journalist, and no ordinary journalist, for her illu-
minating accounts of ongoing events were always infused with her unique poetic
vision. She was absolutely serious about her role as a member of the press. “I am
a working journalist,” she said in an interview with Peter Erikson,
I have a press card. I don’t think I’m a whole lot prouder of anything
in my life than that press card I have with the San Francisco Police
stamp on it… I knew everybody in Harlem, all the politicians, I knew
Malcolm X, I knew all these people because I was a journalist, because
I went around asking questions with my pen and my pad. As a result
of functioning as a journalist, I got very addicted to facts, and listening
to the way people say things, and what they actually say and don’t say,
and to seeing things for myself rather than waiting to hear second- and
third-hand what supposedly happened some place.1
The value of this press card was sometimes symbolic, for it urged her to
comment on virtually all of the important issues of the time. But at other times
it gave her access that she could not have otherwise obtained—she witnessed the
devastation of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake up close, for example—and
therefore allowed us, her readers, to benefit from her addiction to facts.
Reading these articles, one is inevitably struck by June Jordan’s inveterate
optimism, the hope she expresses even under the most hopeless conditions. She
always discovered a path, no matter how narrow, that led toward justice and
equality. This hope was complemented by a determination so vast that it could
urge her into battle even when the odds seemed utterly insurmountable. And
it was always fueled by her righteous rage: “I do not believe that we can restore
and expand the freedoms that our lives require unless and until we embrace the
justice of our rage.”2 Never one to equivocate, June’s words were always direct
and exuded the kind of honesty required not only to acknowledge the emperor’s
obvious nudity but the complexity of the cover-up as well.
At a time when we are much too quick to describe our political emotions
in terms of disenchantment with the powerful—as if we were justified in depos-
iting our grand hopes there in the first place—June Jordan’s voice reminds us
that promise resides in our collective resistance, even when we choose a single
individual to represent what we hope to achieve in the world. June chose Nelson
Mandela to represent the indomitable character of freedom struggles. Mandela
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Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive
was such a powerful representative because, by himself, he did not appear to
be an exceptional individual so far removed from ordinary people and circum-
stances that he could be perceived as the heroic figure ushering the masses to
freedom. She was impressed by “his practical, pragmatic vocabulary which does
not accommodate delusion or despair,” and by the fact that “his summoning of
a ‘democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and
with equal opportunities’ resonated as common sense.”3 It was his common-
sensical representation of justice and equality that June found seductive. And
in describing why Mandela’s freedom was such “big news,” she reveals an im-
portant secret about her own way of viewing the world. Freedom was not some
specter in the distance—it was not the mountain top. Rather it was a calculable
set of conditions that would provide housing and healthcare and education and
happiness to an ever-increasing number of people.
Just as June identified with the South African struggle, she also held the
cause of Palestinian freedom close to her heart. Both the South African people
and the Palestinian people possess, she repeatedly insisted, “a human right to
sanctuary on this planet.”4 If at the time she wrote these columns, the South Af-
rican people seemed to be moving along a trajectory that would guarantee them
that right, and were increasingly supported around the world, the same could
not be said for the Palestinians. Because of the global influence of the state of
Israel, even people who felt drawn to the Palestinian cause were often fearful of
the possible consequences of standing with Palestine. But June was as fearless as
she was principled and, as these columns demonstrate, never hesitated to speak
out against the occupation.
What is remarkable about these articles is their resonance on our contem-
porary political landscape. Many of the issues confronting us are inheritances
from the time evoked in these pieces, unwanted legacies of those who failed to
resolve our most pressing social problems. Conditions demanding affirmative
action, the pandemic of violence against women, corporate destruction of the
environment and the persistence of war—are no less important today than they
were then. But we are also reminded how quickly political propaganda becomes
naturalized within our everyday vocabularies. June writes about the emergence
of what she called the “bizarre notion”5 of illegal aliens. How quickly this idea
has ceased to seem strange and has come to be cavalierly used as a simple de-
scriptor for vast numbers of people who often have no other alternative than to
attempt to rebuild their lives in the U.S. Her defense of immigrant rights fore-
shadows what has become one of the most important contemporary struggles
for democracy.
Many of June Jordan’s columns reflect her penetrating consciousness of
her own positionality and the moral conscience that always accompanied this
viii
Jordan Foreword
self-awareness. As a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, she
founded a project that would cultivate similar sensibilities in her students—Po-
etry for the People. As she brought poetry to her students, and as she and her
university students took poetry to high schools, to juvenile halls, and to jails,
she helped to spread the compassion and dedication to change that was at the
heart of her work. She also taught them about ways of seeing, so evident in
these columns, that combined the immensities of our challenges with the inti-
macies of our experiences. This program continues to explore new terrain. And
these essays further reveal the instructive alchemies of her work: the global and
the home-grown, the political and the personal, the poetic and the journalistic,
posited in productive tension, that will help us discover new pathways toward
freedom.
Angela Davis
ix
Preface
I miss June Jordan. And after you read these breathtaking essays and poems,
you’ll miss her, too, and you’ll want her back, as I do.
No one wrote like June Jordan, packing her lines with beauty and love and
righteous anger.
No one fought harder with her words than June Jordan.
No one, with the possible exception of James Baldwin, used the essay form
so powerfully to indict racism in America.
She hated bullies, whether they were white supremacists or Israelis inflicting
daily indignities on Palestinians.
She savored freedom: to struggle, to travel, to be with a lover.
And her poet’s ear and care bestowed grace upon everything she wrote.
I first met June Jordan when she was giving a reading at the University of
Wisconsin on a hot evening in Madison in the summer of 1988. My wife had
shown me the notice in the paper that this poet (whom, I’m embarrassed to say,
I’d never heard of) was in town.
I didn’t know what to expect. Then she knocked me out.
She struck me with her art and her defiance.
I remember she read her 1978 “Poem for South African Women,” where
she writes about mothers hurling an irreversible force of protest against apart-
heid, and where she challenges others to join them, even unto death. That poem
ends with the iconic line (later borrowed by Barack Obama): “We are the ones
we have been waiting for.”
I was sold. I was the associate editor of The Progressive then, and I knew at
that moment that I wanted to invite her into our pages.
I was so bowled over that I stayed after the reading and bought copies of all
the books of hers that were on sale in the hallway.
Early the next morning, I started to read her 1985 collection called On Call:
Political Essays. She slapped me on the very first page.
“In a sense,” she wrote, “this book must compensate for the absence of a
cheaper and more immediate print outlet for my two cents. If political writing
by a Black woman did not strike so many editors as presumptuous or simply
bizarre, then, perhaps, this book would not be needed. Instead, I might regularly
appear, on a weekly or monthly schedule, as a national columnist.”
That day, in the office, I proposed to rectify this situation by taking June
Jordan up on her offer. And soon she was writing for us.
For many years, she would send her columns in by fax. They were written
in her distinctive, though barely legible, handwriting. Part of the fun was merely
x