June Jordan Quotes

It occurs to me that much organizational grief could be avoided if people understood that partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership for change: When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.

Sure enough, we have plenty of exposure to white everything so why would we opt to remain our African/Asian/Mexican selves? The answer is that suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: There is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you — who you really are — do survive.

If other First World people, if we, ourselves, took a notion to think and act just according to what we felt was good for us, if we thought and if we acted as though the big guys should just take a flying jump out of the nearest window whenever they come pushing their craziness into our countries, our houses, our heads, the whole world would soon become really different really fast.

This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.

I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.

No hallway. Angela stare hard to see a house where people live without a hallway. That mean every part of the house is real. It belong to somebody, and be part of how you live, not how you get to where you live, and be.

I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.

If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language lead us into the equality of power that a democratic state must represent.

We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder's image of us: three fifths of a human being.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

The State
Lay in wait

Attica Attack Troops
wearing masks
carrying gas cannisters
and proud to be white
proud to be doing
what everyone can
for The Man

Unless you accept white male standards of conduct, standards that castigate women for our 'emotionality,' our tears, our tendencies to take human life and responsible love quite seriously, why would you applaud any woman for remaining 'calm' in an outrageous circumstance?

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

For a long time I believe we supposed that the problem was that of misinformation. If only Americans knew the truth of things then they would rally to help, to stop the invasion, the slaughter. What I gradually began to understand, however, was something importantly different. The problem was not one of misinformation, or ignorance. The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.