June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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But (three decades later) and come to find out
we never got invited to the party
we never got included in “the people”
we never got no kind of affirmative action worth
more than the spit in the wind38
While affirmative action was initially deemed illegal in California and could no longer be used in admissions decisions, “faculty Senates of the University of California system and all nine chancellors and the official University of California student organizations voted in 1996 to retain and improve and expand affirmative action policies.”39 For Jordan and many others, affirmative action is still essential if the rights of people of color are to be supported within the public sphere. Jordan, “an angry black woman,” writes on the subject of
“the angry white man” who claims affirmative action puts him at a disadvantage because it denies him equal opportunity and protection under the law and affords historically underrepresented people educational and political progress. On this latter point, the poet acknowledges historical contradic-tions as pertains to colonization and emancipation by complicating the relationship between slavery as exploitative and freedom as a continual struggle for human rights:
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And so we finally got freedom on a piece of paper.
But for two hundred years in this crazy land the law and the bullets behind the law
continued to affirm
the gospel of God-given white supremacy40
…the law affirmed the gospel of God-given white
supremacy God-given male
white supremacy.
Jordan’s use of the phrase “God-given male/white supremacy” asserts her belief that national identity in America is associated with the markers “white” and
“male.” Such an association points to the need to have policies, such as affirmative action and even quality bilingual education programs, that do more than privilege “the angry white man,” “The Face of America,” or “the law-abiding American citizen” at the expense of more inclusive representations of American identity along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.41 Given the proliferation of narratives about American citizenship, national identity, and media-generated images of success, affirmative action, according to Jordan, is needed more than ever today.42 In her essay “In the Land of White Supremacy,” Jordan discusses this latter point: “Hence, affirmative action, for example, is a federal government policy. Hence, the viciously orchestrated attack on ‘affirmative’ for the sake of ‘angry white men’ who, statistics inform us, continue to occupy 95 percent of all senior management positions.”43
The poet’s arguments on affirmative action, race, and inequality from the essays “An Angry Black Woman on the Subject of an Angry White Man” and
“In the Land of White Supremacy” connect well to her arguments in favor of bilingual education. In her essay “Affirmative Acts: Language, Information, and Power,” she spells out the consequences of an insufficient national dia-logue on race and the general public’s resulting lack of, and otherwise incorrect, information about affirmative action issues as related to the education of students of color, and specifically the significance of bilingual education programs. On the subject of bilingual education, Jordan notes that in 1967 the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, “repealed the state’s ninety-five-year-old English-only mandate,” proving that students could benefit from school instruction in their native language.44 Nevertheless, bilingual education came under attack in California in the mid 1990s with Proposition 227, or the
“Anti-Bilingual Education Initiative in California.” This initiative sought to prevent use of languages other than English in California-based classrooms, end programs in bilingual education, and advance approaches in which learners would be immersed in English-only instruction, with consideration of extenuating circumstances for use of one’s first language. According to a news
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report published in the San Francisco Chronicle, dated June 3, 1998, propo-nents of Proposition 227 were victorious against bilingual education programs in the state of California; opponents to the proposition, including the state superintendent, candidates for governor, various other politicians and educators, vowed to file suit.45
Filing suit against this new proposition was not enough for Jordan, who took immediate action by forming and joining coalitions and organizing public protests; however, “creative support, of the California Teachers Association and the California School Board Association” was still being sought.46 She could not believe that such a proposition was endorsed and supported by a majority of the voting public in California. By this time, she was a battle-scarred veteran of human rights movements and America’s culture wars. In the late 1960s, she had participated in the massive student and faculty uprising at City College in New York in support of the college’s open admissions policy. In the early 1970s, she had weathered a public outcry from parents over the publication of her young-adult novel His Own Where, because she wrote it exclusively in Black English. Later, in the early to mid-1980s, she had experienced the dismay of her own college-level students over Alice Walker’s use of Black English in The Color Purple. However, these same students came to acknowledge and respect Black English as a language, which they unknowingly incorporated in terms of speech acts and in the appearance of written dis-cursive structures.
In the 1990s, Jordan was again in the frontlines of protest. This time she took part in the activities supporting the continuance of affirmative action in California, but it was not enough; she wanted to witness and participate in protests that supported bilingual education in California as well. She wanted to highlight the research of “Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas at George Mason University” that followed “42,000 students tracked over thirteen years”
and found that “those who receive solid native language instruction eventually do better in English than those who don’t. ”47 Jordan wanted to fight against this limiting proposition, one that she believed threatened the diversity of students entering academic institutions with native languages other than English. In one way, this proposition sought to racialize immigration through education: Calculated racialization of poverty, inequality, immigration, and education colors these realities so that too many of us begin to perceive these issues as strictly equivalent to this or that race/this or that language/this or that ethnic heritage when, actually, the issue is how will we . . . devise a democratic, and peaceable, means to go on, or not! And actually the question underlying all of that is about principles of equality, principles of justice, principles of democratic entitlement.48
Jordan’s argument connects well to her position on the validity of language, as articulated in later essays.
In “Bilingual Education and Home Language,” Jordan presses the need for multiple languages in the education of linguistically diverse students. She
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poses the provocative questions: “What is the best teaching method to adopt for children with different levels of fluency in one or more languages? How shall we best hope to enable all of our children to become competitively fluent in English?”49 She answers these questions by turning to bilingual education as a successful method to teach academic-based knowledge and critical skills to students. Acknowledging the changing demographics of communities and classrooms, Jordan asserts that English is no longer the language—and it has not been for quite a long time—that defines the American public: “Fewer and fewer American children enter compulsory public schools equipped with English-language fluency.”50 The issue of bilingual education remains a hot topic in California, and Jordan’s position on inv
iting multiple languages into the classroom attests to the value of a democracy that legitimatizes the diversities of its students, or in her own words: “When will a legitimately American language, a language including Nebraska, Harlem, New Mexico, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Alabama and working-class life and freeways and Pac-Man become the language studied and written and glorified in the classroom?”51
Jordan’s work in California—from her university teaching position to her founding of the P4P collective—is related, in many ways, to such programs as the Teachers & Writers Collaborative (New York City) and the Writers-in-the Schools program (Houston, Texas). Also, one can assume that Jordan used the California Poetry in the Schools program (CPITS), initially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as a model for P4P. CPITS, having begun as the Pegasus Project at San Francisco State University in 1964, placed local poets in classrooms throughout the Bay Area to read and teach the elements of poetry writing to youths.52 One of the over-arching goals of CPITS, as with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) and the Writers-in-the-Schools (WITS) program, is to encourage student experimentation with writing as a means of expression, creativity, and exploration through words.
Through her work with T&W in the 1960s, Jordan gained invaluable experience conducting poetry workshops for, and participating in, community-outreach initiatives with young black and Puerto Rican students. T&W, founded by local writers, artists, and educators in New York City in 1967, is a nonprofit organization that conducts various literacy programs, writing workshops, poetry readings and performances, after-school events, and literary seminars for students and teachers in school sites and in its Center for Imaginative Writing located at 5 Union Square West in Manhattan. In addition to June Jordan, participating T&W poets have included Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Ron Padgett, and Phillip Lopate. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Jordan was encouraged to participate in T&W from the organization’s inception in the late 1960s.
In 1983, Phillip Lopate of the University of Houston and Marvin Hoffman, former T&W director, founded WITS in Houston, Texas. On founding the program, Lopate and Hoffman sought innovative methods to introduce students in
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the primary and secondary grade levels to the teaching of writing. Today, WITS
continues to place creative writers, playwrights, poets, novelists, dramatists, and community writers in public-school classrooms to work with students to enhance reading and writing skills through the use of contemporary poetry, literature, art, music, and museum visits. According to Lopate and Hoffman, creative writing and critical thinking allow students to understand themselves in ways that shape their experiences with words and their interactions with others.53
In many ways, T&W, WITS, and CPITS are initiatives that utilize creative media to teach students poetry, to help them shape their critical capacities, and to conceptualize how education can be democratic in practice and method.
The three initiatives also respond to Jordan’s questions: “What is the best teaching method to adopt for children with different levels of fluency in one or more languages? How shall we best hope to enable all of our children to become competitively fluent in English?”54 T&W, WITS, and CPITS encourage students to take “control of the language of your life” and to “build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”55 They motivate teachers and poets to use what the students bring into classrooms—various languages, personal experiences, and literacy activities—as knowledge is co-constructed and perspectives are challenged. Together, T&W, WITS, CPITS, and P4P embrace the power of people’s languages in “a beloved community [where] these young American men and women devise their individual trajectories into non-violent, but ver-ifiable, power.”56 To devise “individual trajectories,” for Jordan, is to collaborate with people in schools and in the surrounding communities as well as to interrogate who one is in relation to others and their struggles. This point was well advanced by Walt Whitman during and immediately following the Civil War, and articulated by Jordan in a poem included in the 1995 text June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint: I ain’t goin nowhere unless you come with me
I say I ain’t goin nowhere lessen you come with me
I ain’t about to be some leaf that lose its tree
So take my hand see how I’m reachin out for you
Hey here’s my hand see now I’m reachin out for you
We got a whole lot more than only one of us can do57
An examination of Jordan’s involvement in P4P and T&W, and the connections her work made to other groups such as CPITS and WITS, demonstrates her commitment to democratic forms of education for students who come to understand the beauty and power of language in written and oral forms.
Jordan’s commitment to literacy, freedom, student apprenticeships in the community and to social equality have been recognized by the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education, which passed a proposal in 2004
to rename a local public high school The June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE)
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as a way to honor Jordan’s many contributions. Students attending the school spent the first year (2003) researching the life and work of Jordan and voted to name the school after the poet. The official naming ceremony was held at the school on Thursday, August 26, 2004.58 Adrienne Torf recounts the following about the school:
The school was built on the small school model. There were three teachers who realized that kids were dropping out of school because no one was paying attention to them. They worked to get this school opened through the California Board of Education. They supported democratic exchanges through student work and explorations to determine for whom the school would be named after, and that’s how the school was named in honor of June Jordan.59
According to the school’s official Web site, the JJSE’s primary mission is the academic preparation of students who are able to “give voice to their dreams and grow into healthy, productive adults.” The school seeks to do this by
“guiding young people to discover and explore their passions, to grow into independent, reflective thinkers, and to build connected, socially just communities, both inside and outside of the school.”60
The parent organization of the JJSE, the Small Schools for Equity, collaborates with local students, parents, and educational institutions, including San Francisco State University and California State University. It seeks to sustain Jordan’s legacy by fostering democratic relationships among educators, students, and parents. Jordan’s teaching at UC Berkeley, her creation of P4P, and the naming of the JJSE reiterate her devotion to education and to the politics of humanity. The latter point is echoed in her work with The Progressive.
Sometime after Jordan moved to California and began her work with P4P, she was invited by Matthew Rothschild to write a regular column for The Progressive. The magazine, based in Madison, Wisconsin, serves as “a journalistic voice for peace and social justice at home and abroad [by] opppos[ing]
militarism, the concentration of power in corporate hands, the disenfranchisement of the citizenry, poverty, and prejudice in all its guises.” The Progressive is a public forum that produces a political magazine and a radio show; it also directs a media project aimed at distributing op-ed pieces “in large and small newspapers around the country. The Progressive Media Project has also hosted more than 40 skills-building op-ed writing clinics from foundation grantees, nonprofit organizations, activists and community groups.”61 Contributors to the political magazine have included social critics, political leaders, and literary thinkers such as Jane Addams, James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King, Jr., Carl Sandburg, and Edward Said. Jordan joined
the list of contributors and became a regular columnist with the publication of her February 1989 essay “Finding the Way Home.” Her final column, published in the magazine in November 2001, is entitled, “Do You Do Well To Be Angry?”
Other essays written by Jordan for The Progressive include “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001, March), “The Hunters
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and the Hunted,” originally titled, “Hunting for Jews?” (1999, October), “A Letter to Maria” (2000, October), “Requiem for the Champ” (1992, February),
“Can I Get a Witness” (1991, December), “A New Politics of Sexuality” (1991, July), “The Big-Time Coward (1991, April), “On War and War and War and . . .” (1991, February), “Diversity or Death” (1990, June), “Unrecorded Agonies” (1989, December), and “Where is the Rage?” (1989, October).
The poet wrote many more essays for the magazine, some of which were published, while others were rejected: the latter included essays on Palestine, Lebanon, Islam, Bosnia, U.S.-based racism, state violence, genocide of the Jews, refugees, political commitments, Anita Hill, and Rodney King, among other topics. Many of her Progressive works are reprinted in her essay collections Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union (1992), Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), and Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (2002). In all of her writing, Jordan articulates the point that she is “always hoping to do better than to collaborate with whatever or whomever it is that means me no good.”62 Her Progressive magazine work, essay and poetry collections, children’s and young-adult literature, keynote addresses, recorded interviews, teaching appointments, and the creation of P4P represent her conscious decision to use language to fight against the enemies and to devise “methods of resistance against tyranny of any kind.”63