Context & Exigence: What topic/conversation is this text responding to? What year is the text published? What is the exigence–that is, what motivating occasion/issue/concern prompted the writing? The motivating occasion could be a current or historical event, a crisis, pending legislation, a recently published alternative view, or another ongoing problem.
| In this essay, June Jordan 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. This selection of works, called On Call were published in 1985 and correspond to political essays made by the author. The topic is of the greatest relevance, both on the date it was published and now, just look at the list of recent deaths (2020) that police brutality in the United States leaves as a balance, and where, without exception, the target, always, are black people. 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. In Toni Morrison’s words “the problem of internalizing the master’s tongue is the problem of the rescued” (Toni Morrison. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, P. XXV) |
Author: Who is the author of this text? What are the author’s credentials and what is their investment in the issue?
| June Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet, playwright, essayist, and professor of English at the University of California, Berkley. June Millicent Jordan 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” (Jordan, June. Civil War. New York: Touchstone. 1981, P. 100) 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. |
Text: What can you find out about the publication? What is the genre of the text (e.g., poem, personal essay, essay, news/academic article, blog, textbook chapter, etc.)? How do the conventions of that genre help determine the depth, complexity, and even appearance of the argument? What information about the publication or source (magazine, newspaper, advocacy Web site) helps explain the writer’s perspective or the structure and style of the argument?
| “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. is part of the works published in the text, published in 1985. 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. |
Audience: Who is the author’s intended audience? What can you infer about the audience (think about beliefs and political association but also age, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, profession, education, geographic location, religion, etc.)? Look for clues from the text (especially the original publication) to support your inference.
| Jordan establishes as the main focus of the text, and probably most of her texts, a student audience. She is a teacher, educator, creator of a poetry center and editor of multiple instances, all of them linked to university spaces and in this particulate case, she remembers 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. 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. |
Purpose: What is the author trying to accomplish? To persuade, entertain, inform, educate, call to action, shock? How do you know?
| How many times in the history of this country has the concept of Black Lives Matters been made manifest? More than one can count. I am inclined to think that this is a good way to understand the text. I understand that there are two points of narrative construction that are combined, achieving a perfect understanding between the two and obtaining a closed total. On the one hand there is a staging of what it means, linguistically speaking, to understand the use of the language as racial and cultural identity. The author, recalls, part of her classes and discusses these elements, the black content of English, is above all a matter of resistance and identity. On the other hand, she highlights the figure of one of her students and how he suffers in first person the violence against black lives. Him brother is killed by the police in Brooklyn and that is just one more number in a long statistic. No matter what they try to do, ask, summon, beg, request, New York society is too used to the death of black men and women, Reggie Jordan was really dead. She takes this situation and presents it in such a clear way that she cannot but convey the feeling and question of and how many more are needed to die, so that this society understands that it cannot continue to deliver its own citizens. Unfortunately, Reggie Jordan’s death continues to have so many other names. Every day there are new names |
Argument: What do you believe is the main claim/idea/argument that the author is trying to communicate? What stance does s/he take?
| I think you have already dealt with the previous points. |
Evidence: How is the argument supported? Types of support include reasons and logical explanations as well as evidence. Types of evidence include anecdotes, examples, hypothetical situations, (expert) testimony, quotes, citing sources, statistics, charts/graphs, research the author or another source conducts, scientific or other facts, general knowledge, historical references, metaphors/analogies, etc.
| These quotes particularly call my attention in light of the development of the text and its implications. “Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo, but we should understand its status as an endangered species, as a perishing, irreplaceable system of community intelligence, or we should expect its extinction, and, along with that, the extinguishing of much that constitutes our own proud, and singular, identity.” “Nonetheless, White standards of English persist, supreme and unquestioned, in these United States.” “In contrast to India, where at least fourteen languages co-exist as legitimate Indian languages, in contrast to Nicaragua, where all citizens are legally entitled to formal school instruction in their regional or tribal languages compulsory education in America compels accommodation to exclusively White forms of “English” “White English”, in America, is “Standard English” “The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness. If we Insisted that the language of Black English adheres to a distinctive Black syntax, then we were postulating a profound difference between White and Black people, per se. Was it a difference to prize or to obliterate?” “At last, his sadly jumbled account let me surmise, as follows: Brooklyn police had murdered his unarmed, twenty-five-year-old brother, Reggie Jordan. Neither Willie nor his elderly parents knew what to do about it. Nobody from the press was interested. His folks had no money. Police ran his family around and around, to no point. And Reggie was really dead. And Willie wanted to fight, but he felt helpless.” |
Rhetorical Strategies: What aspects of this text stand out for you as a rhetorical reader? In other words, what do you observe about what the author strategically does (consciously or not) in hopes of appealing to their audience? List here as many observations as you can make about what the text does.
| She appeals to identity, to history, to concern, to the appreciation of her students, to the merit of reflection, to spontaneous actions on the part of her class, to transformation, to amazement, to the sadness of buying that black lives are just that, the lives of black men and women. |
Citation: Add the correct MLA or APA bibliographic entry for this text. Use easybib.com if you prefer.
| June Jordan. “Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan” in Reading Culture: Context for critical Reading and Writing, eds. George, Diana and John Trimbur (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007) |
Notes: What do you want to remember about this text?
| Everything |
