Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on social injustice and the underlying issues of race and class in political conflicts.
June Jordan articulates a critical observation about the political and social dynamics that often sideline marginalized groups. She points out that while those in power may loudly debate ideologies like democracy, the real consequences of their conflicts disproportionately affect the underprivileged, particularly those who do not belong to the dominant racial or economic group. Jordan's words urge us to recognize the systemic inequalities that persist in society, highlighting the need for awareness and action against injustice.
In practice
During a speech on social justice, highlighting the implications of race in political discourse.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
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.
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.
Understand that we are all co-creators of our respective destinies.
Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
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