“Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan”
On Call: Political Essays. June Jordan
Audiencia: Classmate of Freshman Composition ENGL 11000 M [25091]
“Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan” is part of the works published in the text: On Call: Political Essays. It is part of the works presents in the text and published in 1985. This rhetorical analysis seeks to establish which are the main elements that Jordan establishes in his text. In a particular way, the analysis will try to respond to how she develops the problem of linguistic dominance, in terms of a silenced linguistic use, the dialect of the Afro-American community (“black English”), how this linguistic mode resists a delegitimizing stereotype in social terms and undervalued in cultural terms and like this reality, the use of language as an instrument of social, cultural and economic resilience is intertwined with the reality of political and electoral discrimination against the Afro-American population.
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet, playwright, essayist, and professor of English at the University of California, Berkley. She was a Jamaican American self-identified bisexual. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture. She was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
“No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America” [1] The selected paragraph speaks a lot, in a few words about the feelings of Jordan and her reflection on himself and her loved ones. She in the middle of a “white world” that coexists with a large number of deferential population, blacks and immigrants, but in an understanding of a dominant country, where the discourse and history is read in a centralized and exclusive way, only by WHITE, the “another” is just that, other, without citizen status, without linguistic condition, without history and without future. Her Ethos is as significant as it is abundant. She empowers her voice with the experience that is nurtured and the academic and educational world in which it develops, are favored by her reflection and analysis.
Jordan wrote several books within the same category, political analysis, and 28 books throughout his life. She focused her interest on issues related to race, gender, languages, politics of domination and resistance. Within this, the political analysis carried out is constant direct.
Jordan’s Pathos is establishes as the main focus of the text, and probably most of her texts, a student audience, as a teacher, she remembers, in this essay, this course: “In Search of the Invisible Black Woman”, that was the context for the analysis. Her intention is once again to confront the “distant racial and police violence” (South Africa) with the immediate New York police violence, which, like the South African, kills black civilians. Nothing differs from one to the other.
Relevant is the approach and how she delivers it. Jordan sets and weaves two stories together, one concerning a class she taught on Black English and the other concerning Willie Jordan, a young black student in the class trying to come to terms with injustice in South Africa while facing the death of his brother through police brutality at home in Brooklyn. Jordan’s story of how her students discovered the communicative power and clarity of Black English forms the backdrop for Willie Jordan’s struggle to articulate his own understanding of oppressive power.
Jordan delves into the text, as in other of his many political essays, institutionalized brutality against the African American population and how it shapes an oppressive society and language. The author gives main importance to the subject of language, language understood as the vehicle of collective and individual imagination that delivers the notion of the world, for this reason, she insists so fiercely on rescuing and situating what she calls “Black English” as a form of reconceptualize society.
The argument is explicitly presented and developed, she does it directly and identifies it clearly and abundantly. The author has her best evidence, which directly supports the text posed in reality. She uses to develop her argument, the information known on two central issues, racial and linguistic discrimination of the Afro-American community within the country, discrimination that can be extended to other immigrant or minority communities. that’s a compilation source. The second, which the text supports in the same way, is the evidence of police brutality, constant, uninterrupted, systematic and that almost without exception, has its focus of aggression in the Afro-American community. Jordan finds an unfortunate parallel between the death of a South African anti-apartheid leader and the death of the brother of one of her most brilliant students. In other words, you don’t have to leave NYC to see the same repression.
She performs a theoretical and analytical exercise of excellence. She achieves, based on a youthful, university-level audience, the members of her class, to install an abundant reflection, which awakens consciences and makes people think. That manages to mobilize young people in pursuit of a greater objective.
Jordan presents an analysis that is difficult to question, from a historical point of view, therefore, the possibility of discussing “alternative realities” is not plausible. She makes a forceful statement, with abundant examples of how the language responds to control stereotypes, and how these are a representation of everyday life. Different visions are possible, obviously, but they have no real depth.
The objective of the text is to emphasize the power, forms, uses and scope of language. how it builds reality and supports models, most of the time not egalitarian among all citizens and how it serves to “exclude or stigmatize” groups viewed as different.
The text is contemplated in its design as part of a whole that serves in the learning contents of university students. What she probably seeks is to advance in criticism, in reflection, in the conceptualization of violence, as a daily fact, close to one and that deserves and needs a response.
She understands and knows the issue that she raises in depth. she has experienced it in the first person, she is a woman, bisexual, Afro-descendant. With that alone, she has already experienced a good deal of discrimination. She manages, like any good teacher, to install in her students a topic of reflection, analysis, discussion and, therefore, leads new and more generations to consider a different society.
The effectiveness of the author is demonstrated throughout her professional and activist activity. She established a dynamic of lectures that embraced students, but also the general public. She develops her planning through poetry and political anxiety. Therefore, she knows how to convey the message she is looking for.
She starts from a historical vision, to establish a connection with the present and specifically with members of her students. She finds her own and fertile space to establish the discussion and be effective in the approaches she makes around the subject.
That is, in my understanding, the Logos of the text, and within that perspective, I understand, Jordan does not omit anything.
In this second part I would like to relate Jordan’s reflection with a topic of maximum validity, history and significance: Voting Rights and Voter Suppression, and add what I cannot stop thinking, joining both points: “The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same”. I had originally contemplated developing this second part, relating Jordan’s analysis with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) problem and highlighting the enormous significance that his approaches continue to have, but these days this topic also makes so much sense, hence, the why of my change in my comparative focus.
I will use as a point of reference the article of Jin Rutenberg, “A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-Year Campaign to Roll Back the Voting Rights Act.”, The New York Times Magazine. (July 29, 2015).
Voter suppression against African Americans in the United States started as soon as the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, the second one of the Reconstruction Amendments, and has remained a constant, with varying levels of intensity, throughout American history. At times, the suppression has been de jure (by law) while at other times it has been de facto (in fact).
Began a system of unparalleled brutality which lasted until 1865 and which led to a brutal Civil War between the North and the South (1861-1865). Slavery was formally abolished with the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, another one of the Reconstruction Amendments, in 1865. However, the abolition of slavery did not enfranchise people of African descent. It took yet another amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, to give African men (not women) the right to vote. Women, of any race, had to wait until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 to be able to vote, after an arduous struggle by courageous women known as suffragettes.
The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Africans but it also set off a movement against such enfranchisement. Opposition to the enfranchisement of African Americans took several forms. They perpetrated shootings, lynchings and whippings to prevent African Americans from exercising the right to votes. The opposition also took the form of state and local laws known as Black Codes and Jim Crow, segregationist laws which, among other things interfered with the rights of African Americans to exercise their right to vote. One of the most significant cases in this regard was the U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Here a black man challenged a segregationist Louisiana statute which provided for separate cars on trains for white and blacks. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Plessy and established what came to be known as the “separate but equal” standard. With this decision, segregationists had the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court. Segregation was the law of the land until the Supreme Court reversed itself in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that the ‘separate but equal” standard was unconstitutional. However, many states continued to resist enforcement and implementation of the Brown decision.
This apparent legal advance, but ineffective in the everyday reality of the Afro-American population, does not show, but rather the consistency of Jordan’s analysis, which from his place denounces, questions and makes us rethink what is the relationship that the Afro-American community has had to tolerate with regarding their “white peers”, for decades and the personal, emotional and cultural cost that this has had in a systematic way.
It has long been understood that there is a major difference between the theory and the practice of the law. In no other area is this more evident than in the enfranchisement of African Americans. Jim Rutenberg has stated that “By law the franchise extended to black voters; in practice it often did not.”[2] Opposition was swift and fierce. If you were African American in the American South and you wanted to exercise your right to vote, you had to contend with legal and terroristic hurdles.
Despite the hurdlles, the Civil Rights Movement brought about significant changes. One of the most significant of those changes was the 1965 Voting Rights Act signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. “In the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Congress significantly strengthened legislation protecting voting rights by barring literacy and other tests as a condition for voting in six southern states, by setting criminal penalties for interference with efforts to vote, and by providing for the replacement of local registrars with federally appointed registrars in counties designated by the attorney general as significantly resistant to registering eligible blacks to vote.”[3]
However, those advances have met with resistance. Efforts to suppress black voters have remainted constant. In 2010, Republican got control of many state legislatures and began to roll back the progress that had been made. Then in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court made a decision which paved the way for further voter suppression laws and practices. In Shelby v. Holder (2013) “the U.S. Supreme Court directly countermanded the Section 5 authority of the Justice Department to dispute any of these changes in the states Section 5 cover. case.”[4] U.S. SupremeCourtChief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, ruled that the voting rights acts had done what they were supposed to do and therfore, as he saw it, it was time to move on. In doing so, he effecively threw out the pre-clearance requirement which certain states had to go through before making changes to voting laws. This is a major drawback in voting rights jurisprudence because it allows states to institute restrictions which disproprotionately affect African Americans and Latinos without federal oversight. The Shelby County ruling was most unfortunate and in fact the recently deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used an apt metaphor in her dissenting opinion. She wrote, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rain storm because you are not getting wet.” [empahasis added][5]
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision opened the door for states to pass Photo ID requirements for voting and selective closing of polling places without federal oversight. Strict ID laws have proven effective in deterring voters in significant numbers. The ACLU has stated that “These strict ID laws are part of an ongoing strategy to suppress the vote, and it works. Voter ID laws have been estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office to reduce voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, translating to tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.”[6] In an article by Theodore R. Johnson and Max Feldman, published by the Brennan Center, they wrote that “Over the past decade, half the states in the nation have placed new, direct burdens on people’s right to vote, abetted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. And the racial cause and effect of these seemingly race-neutral laws are hard to escape.”[7]In other words, when a state engages in voter suppression that state can now assert that it has the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the things that those who seek to suppress black voters have done is to engage in “clean up” or “purge” of voter’s rolls. Here a few words must be said about ‘in person voter fraud’ and ‘election fraud.’ The former involves situations “in which you impersonate someone or try to vote more than once, or at all if you are ineligible- is almost entirely nonexistent in the United States”[8] Simply put, it almost never happens. However, “election fraud-ballot stuffing, vote buying, machine rigging-is not unheard of, and in that shade of distiction lay an important new development.”[9] Under the excuse of voter fraud, conservaive groups like the Voter Integrity Project (VIP) offered to clean up voter rolls and this practice, legitimate in appearance, allowed the removal of large number of African Americans from voter rolls under the pretense of purging those rolls of ineligible voters.
Voter suppression is a serious matter which undermines the core principle of American democracy: one person one vote. To paraphrase Jordan, could it be that deep down, that the Afro-American population has a lower status as a person, which makes it possible to “legalize” “justify” and “consolidate” the obstacle they have to exercise their right to vote? The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has become complicit in this practice is dishartening as historically, African Americans have looked to the Court to redress their grievances. The current Supreme Court has chosen to shut the door in the face of those African Americans and Hispanics who look to it for enforcement of their constitutional protection. These states have large Latino populations and certain counties in those sttates have instituted Photo ID requirements and in the case of Arizona, proof of U.S. citiznship which disproprtinately impact Chicanos and Latinos in those states. Additionally, after the Shelby decision, Texas has engagede gerrymandering, the redistricting of areas with Latino residents to split those votes and prevent election of candidates responsive to Latino issues.
Richard North Patterson has written that “Trump and his party are fundamentally opposed to that most basic tenet of democracy: an honest and inclusive election. Instead, they want to choose their own electorate through selectively excluding probable Democratic voters —minorities, urbanites, and the young— by making it more difficult for such people to vote and, in this year of COVID-19, more dangerous.”[10] It appears that President Trump is setting the stage to contest the outcome of an election is likely to lose. I come from a Chile, a South American country with a history of dictatorship and I must say that when I hear the president undermine the legitimacy of the presential election, it takes me back to the years when a dictator named Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile. President’s Trump’s language and gestures are reminiscent of fascist dictators in Europe in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1970s.
If we manage to do the exercise of recognizing who we are, how we manage to act in the society that has been presented to us, we can look, I believe, with serenity and in a complete way the history of which we are part. That is what I am left with as I review Jordan’s primary text and his vital defense of the African-American community, language and culture and his brilliant examples of how it has withstood the onslaught of a model unable to integrate. By taking this reflection and incorporating it into the dynamics of political and electoral exclusion, so present in recent times, moreover, when we are two weeks away from new presidential elections, I only confirm the first, Jordan was a clear, brave and lucid poet, intellectual and teacher who put in his reflection, what to this day does not change: the exclusion, in multiple ways, of the African-American population and the systematic attempt to reduce their influence and contribution
[1] Jordan, June. Civil War. (New York: Touchstone). 1981, 100.
[2] Jin Rutenberg, “A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-Year Campaign to Roll Back the Voting Rights Act.”, The New York Times Magazine. July 29, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html?searchResultPosition=3
[3] Ginsberg, Benjamin, Theodore J. Lowi, Margaret Weir and Caroline Tolbert, We the People. (New York and London: W.W. Norton). Chapter Five, 175.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, SHELBY COUNTY v. HOLDER. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, OCTOBER TERM, 2012, 64. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf
[6] American Civil Liberties Union. “Block the Vote. Voter Suppression in 2020.” 2020 (February 3).
[7] Theodore Johnson and Max Feldman. “The New Voter Suppression.” New York City: The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, 2020 (January 16) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression
[8]Jin Rutenberg, “A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-Year Campaign to Roll Back the Voting Rights Act.”, 14.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Richard North Patterson. “Donald Trump vs Democracy.” The Bulwark. 2020 (July 28). https://thebulwark.com/donald-trump-vs-democracy/
