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.
Interpretation
The pathways to understanding black identity in America are fraught with trauma and extraordinary resilience.
June Jordan's quote reflects on the complex and often painful experiences that shape black identity in America. She highlights that traditional routes to identity are marked by extreme challenges such as suicide, violence, and a different form of courage, suggesting that the journey to understanding oneself and one's culture can be abnormal and difficult, yet also infused with a moral strength that defies these adversities.
In practice
In a discussion on racial identity during a seminar on American history.
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.
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.
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.
Pour out wine till I become a wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue.
Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
It is important to ask ourselves, as citizens, whether a world power can provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety.
If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.
Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
All the dark, intricate, puzzling providences at which we were sometimes so offended...we shall [one day] see to be to us, as the difficult passage through the wilderness was to Israel, "the right way to the city of habitation".
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.