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.
Interpretation
Being a feminist and being Black both require a deep commitment to self-love and self-respect.
In this quote, June Jordan expresses the intertwining of her identities as a Black woman and a feminist, highlighting that the essence of feminism is rooted in self-love and self-respect. She underscores how these identities compel her to cultivate a profound sense of worthiness and dignity, suggesting that the struggle for equality is as critical as the necessity of loving and respecting oneself.
In practice
In a speech about empowerment in a women's conference.
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.
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.
A country which does not respect the rights of its own citizens will not respect the rights of its neighbours
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.
Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
We have so committed ourselves in different ways that we have hardly any time for self-reflection, to observe, to study.
To the extent that you eliminate ego from your activities, God comes into them - but no more and no less. Begin with that, and let it cost you your uttermost. In this way, and no other, is true peace to be found.
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