June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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The challenge of higher education in the whole world of America is this: to lift the standards of the teachers and of the required core curriculum so that we who would teach can look into the eyes of those who would learn from us without shame and without the perversions of ignorance disguised as Noble Mystery.13
In many of her related writings, Jordan compares higher education to “finding a needle in the haystack,” in which a tiny portion of the population is rewarded for educational performance based on class privilege: material and economic resources, wealth, status, and power. So as not to engage in this privileging of the wealthy majority over the nonwealthy minority, the program pairs critical and sophisticated instruction in poetry writing with political empowerment in the greater urban communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. For Jordan, this pairing is fundamental in extending the ideals of higher education into literacy activities, life experiences, and effective service-learning initiatives. It is also fundamental to the democratization of language, the changing of political structures, and the achievement of real civil rights.
The latter point is articulated in Jordan’s essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” in which she conceptualizes the value of poetry as a means of creatively urgent expression inherently connected to an understanding of American-based democratic systems. She writes that, at times, she feels like “a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language
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that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.”14 She is drawn to Whitman, the father of American poetry—“What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man?”15—because of the moral issues present in his work. She is drawn to Whitman, a poet she describes as her “equal” and “colleague,” because he and other New World poets16 “insistently devise legitimate varieties of cultural nationalism.”17 Of Whitman, Jordan remarks,
It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who share the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet. . . But I didn’t know about Walt Whitman. Yes, I had heard about this bohemian, this homosexual, even. . . . Not only was Whitman not required reading, he was, on the contrary, presented as a rather hairy buffoon suffering from a childish pro-clivity for exercise and open air.18
June Jordan’s writings on Walt Whitman confirm, at least for the poet and her students, that poetry has the power to critique class privilege, racism, sexism, and homophobia by employing inclusive and democratic language. Or as Whitman writes, “I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate/itself or to be understood,/I see that the elementary laws never apologize.”19 These spiritual laws signify a continual search for the truth and justice of humanity; Whitman’s search is marked by his experience as a nurse during the Civil War and then as a poet documenting concerns over race, sexuality, and discrimination after the war. His work became a symbol of a young America.
Jordan follows Whitman’s tradition of writing poetry that connects politics with passion and attempts to make sense of a strange country supposedly based on democratic principles of justice. Many of her poems repeat key words and phrases, are written in free verse, and are about sociopolitical matters that affect groups of people. Additionally, Jordan’s erotic poetry follows the tradition of Whitman’s erotic poems in its honest confessions of love, passion, and sexual desire. Her teaching and community work, particularly as related to P4P, offers a radical commentary on the significance of Whitman’s work. In the
“Introduction” to The Portable Walt Whitman, editor Mark Van Doren writes,
“The life he [Whitman] praises is still to be lived; or it can be imagined as existing now if details are not scrutinized.” Van Doren continues by articulat-ing Whitman’s position on living as connected to education and citizenship: He asserts it with all his might, dismissing as he does so the feeble thing which passes for education in seminaries and colleges. Such an education enervates and tames the citizen. Whitman would release that same citizen, whoever he is, into a larger world where education would go under its own power, with no one but America for schoolmistress. . . . Let there be no more heroes; or rather, let every individual be a hero, let the average man become divine.20
Whitman’s insistence that every human is a “hero” is reiterated in Jordan’s claim that poetry, in belonging to the people, should employ democratic language that addresses human conditions. With her participation in the literary
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tradition of Whitman, Jordan claims language as a currency of power that tells the truth and demonstrates the heroic nature of “every individual” brave enough to document experiential learnings within the world. Such points are indicative of Jordan’s democratic vision for P4P, a collective based on community involvement, communicative interactions, and mutual exchanges through poetry writing.
Jordan’s reflections on Whitman also confirm the need for P4P to include less frequently studied poets in its curriculum in ways that require student poets to read, write about, and make contact with published New World poets.21 This confirmation presents itself even more vividly in Jordan’s belief in a shared struggle that she, like Whitman, is a part of—one that “tell[s] the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boast-fully.”22 Through her work with students in P4P, Jordan made conscious efforts to unveil this truth of injustice, public effort at silencing groups of people, and contempt by searching for available languages that would account for multiple truths and justices in the world.
As she searched for available language and as she challenged her students to make use of their prior knowledge and experience, Jordan introduced them to a wide range of poets, poetry, innovative structures, and literary techniques for writing. P4P’s community involvement and outreach efforts extended into schools, community centers, churches, jails, and prisons, offering a model for the artist as activist. The involvement of P4P in surrounding communities is exemplary of Jordan’s platform for developing democratic forms of education and effective, meaningful teaching. As a teacher, Jordan recalls her early dislike of “compulsory education” because of its failure to connect to her personal and familial experiences, and gendered and raced identities: “When I was going to school, too much of the time I found myself an alien body force-fed stories and facts about people entirely unrelated to me, or my family.”23
Jordan’s sentiments here are reminiscent of those expressed by Brazilian edu-cationalist Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed regarding the “culture of silence” experienced by countless people and perpetuated by educational systems.24 Jordan was a part of this “culture of silence” and confirms that the lessons learned and tasks performed in school ignored her familial history: The regular demands upon me only required my acquiescence to a program of instruction predetermined without regard for my particular history, or future. I was made to learn about “the powerful”: those who won wars or conquered territory or whose odd ideas about poetry and love prevailed inside some distant country where neither my parents nor myself would find welcome.25
Always the outsider, June Millicent Jordan was forver searching for “welcome,”
beginning with her educational experience at PS 26 elementary school and other New York City public schools as a child, and then later at Milwood High School, Northfield School for Girls, Barnard College, and the University of
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Chicago as a young adult. Year after year, her curiosity increased with regard to the homogeneity of the literary canon. Year after year, she noticed an absence of works by no
nwhite artists in her required educational curriculum.
Instead of turning away from schooling, however, she vented her frustration with the one-sided American educational system by writing poetry, reading canonical and noncanonical works, and committing herself to a life of social activism and teaching. Writer George Orwell’s “The Politics of the English Language” (1946) and architect W. R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) were significant texts in Jordan’s contemplations about education, language, and the fate of humanity. The latter text influenced Jordan’s way of thinking as well as her political and intellectual developments.
With this in mind, P4P represents Jordan’s conscious effort to confront the dilemmas of educational and political systems that ignore multiple human realities and conditions and perpetuate the status quo. Her P4P effort consciously revises “compulsory education” and its operational methods by placing students in active, participatory roles alongside their teachers, and by redefining the relationship between the classroom and the community.
Yet P4P did not completely reject traditional educational methods. Jordan wholeheartedly believed that people should know the history that has occurred before them, and how they are placed within that history, if they are to organize for systemic changes in the present. She believed that a lot can be learned from studying canonical works, literary histories, poetic forms (Orwell, Shelley, and Whitman, for example), and from inviting into academic spaces the experiences of students who are taught to critique such works as they contribute to knowledge construction, expressive forms of communication, and new ideas. The poet hoped that such lessons would open new possibilities: “As a teacher I was learning how not to hate school: how to overcome the fixed, predetermined, graveyard nature of so much of formal education: come and be buried here among these other (allegedly) honorable dead.”26
As a teacher, particularly at UC Berkeley, Jordan demanded that her classrooms and pedagogical practices be student centered. In the “Introduction” to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, she writes about how she “revise[d] and devise[d] a reading list and a method of handling diverse writings” for overwhelmingly heterogeneous students in her African American Freshman Composition course.27 In her Women’s Studies course “The Politics of Childhood,” she discovered a group of “White . . . young women packed together in an expectant, rabble-rousing spirit.” In her Contemporary Women’s Poetry and African American Poetry courses, she taught “James Weldon Johnson or Adrienne Rich” alongside writings by her very own students.28 In her teaching experiences with diverse student populations at Berkeley, Jordan demonstrated an invested interest in students’ lives and work.
This interest manifested itself in the organization of P4P courses along multiple literary, linguistic, social, geopolitical, and cultural traditions. Likewise, Jordan’s interest in her students showed itself in the public poetry readings of
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both students and published poets, radio broadcasts, media appearances, and publications of student work, all of which augmented the student learning experience. Of such practices, she writes eloquently: “This outward and inward attunement seems to me a most reasonable basis for the political beginning of a beloved community: a democratic state in which the people can trust the names they have invented for themselves and for each other.” On the latter point of trusting names, Jordan continues, “It is this trustworthy use of words that poetry requires, and inspires. It is this highest ideal of trustworthy intersection among differing peoples that poetry can realize: POETRY FOR
THE PEOPLE!”29
A pattern emerged in June Jordan’s teaching life—from her days with Teachers & Writers Collaborative (1967) and at open admissions City College (1967) to her time at the University of California, Berkeley (1989–2001)—
especially against the backdrop of the demise of both affirmative action and bilingual education in California. In her essay “Finding the Haystack in the Needle or, The Whole World of America and the Challenge of Higher Education,”
Jordan offers the following sentiments on education, following her poetry reading to a diverse student audience at Los Angeles Community College: And for those of us stranded inside the conundrum of teaching English to a fully entitled American population that is neither English nor, increasingly, born to the language of those who set the standards of power in our country, perhaps we can try to teach what we are learning, now, with so much pain . . . but timorous hope: If you want to talk with somebody you have to arrive at the same language
. . . talking the same language cannot and must not mean “my language and not yours” or “your language and not mine.” It means finding a way to understand, not to change or to eclipse or to obliterate.30
Jordan had learned that the college was not equipped with “a nurse or health faculty,” “psychological counseling,” or “doors on the bathroom stalls.” In fact, most composition courses at Los Angeles Community College were overcrowded, with approximately 30 students per class and 150 total students for each composition instructor in a semester.31 Even in this underfunded educational environment, Jordan’s belief that people must locate ways to communicate experiences still prevailed, as conversing with others requires a genuine commitment to negotiating what one knows with what one needs to know through the currency of language. It is this intellectual exchange that opens the possibilities for creating equity in education, understanding the lives of others, and implementing quality resources for students in invigorating learning environments. Jordan left that reading at the community college motivated to continue the fight for justice and the quest for truth.
Unfortunately, Jordan’s belief in diversifying languages and her vision of having an array of experiences present in the schools did not prevail in the political arena. When Californians voted against affirmative action in 1996
through the passage of Proposition 209, also known as the “California Civil
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Rights Initiative,” affirmative action was officially deemed illegal in California schools. At Berkeley, where Jordan had been a popular professor for over a decade, affirmative action could no longer be used in admissions decisions—a move that questioned former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s statement: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity, . . . not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”32 Affirmative action was no longer viewed as a welcome tool for equaling the educational playing field as it was purported to be in the 1978 Baake Case. In this case, the Supreme Court voted in favor of Justice Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr.’s argument that affirmative action is a justifiable necessity that has educational benefits for dynamic, diverse, and intellectual collegiate experiences. Nevertheless, recent arguments from the political Right against affirmative action included the belief that affirmative action had outlived its useful life as a policy that addresses a national history of discrimination and inequality, as in the Baake Case. Some even called affirmative action “reverse discrimination.”
Against this backdrop of reactionary mainstream politics, Jordan campaigned with others for the continued existence of affirmative action in the University of California system. In her many essays, particularly “An Angry Black Woman on the Subject of an Angry White Man” and “Affirmative Acts: Language, Information, and Power,” she countered the conservatives’ assertions with political analysis and arguments of her own. Jordan’s essay “An Angry Black Woman” is “Dedicated to the Negro U. C. Regent, Ward Connerly, who gave more than $100,000 to the campaign of Governor Pete Wilson and who led the U. C. Regent attack on Affirmative Action, 1995.”33 Jordan cites American slavery as a primary example of brutality, economic exploitation, and greed. She writes,
We didn’t always need affirmative action
when we planted and harvested the crops
when we dug into the earth for water
when we carried that water into the big house and
bedrooms34
Affirmative action, Jordan argues, was not always needed when black people were valued primarily as property, the legal subordinates of those who used black bodies to create and maintain wealth and dominance: when we fed and clothed other people’s children with the food we cooked and served to
other people’s children wearing the garments that we fitted . . .
when we bleached and pressed linens purchased by the dollar blood profits from our
daily forced laborings35
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Obviously, “the dollar/blood profits” refer to unpaid labor, calling into question just how such human labor and debt would be repaid, if at all. Affirmative action, argues Jordan, is not enough: “we did not need affirmative action. No!
We needed overthrow/and a holy fire to purify/the air./And so we finally got freedom on a piece of paper.”36 The proposition that makes affirmative action illegal in a state such as California is too much. One does not forget about the Ku Klux Klan, violence, and discrimination. Affirmative action, for Jordan, is indeed needed in order for people to have
. . . a way into
the big house
besides the back door. We needed a chance at the classroom and the jobs and open
housing
in okay neighborhoods37
Jordan argues that affirmative action is still necessary in America, and specifically in California, because the past is not the past; racism and violence, discriminatory practices and unfair representation, are present-day realities that must not be ignored in mainstream narratives of belonging and assimilatory strategies: