Quotations From JUNE JORDAN

... the courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

June Jordan (b. 1936), U.S. poet, essayist, and social critic. On Call, ch. 3 (1985).
Written in 1981, on the refusal of American law courts to enforce child support orders and agreements, although they did enforce installment-payment contracts. Jordan's own husband had left her and their eight-year-old child for another woman.

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.

As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truthwhatever the truth may bethat fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.

June Jordan (b. 1936), U.S. poet, essayist, and social critic. On Call, ch. 10 (1985).
Written in 1984.

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.