Some of Us Did Not Die Quotes

“Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan

“If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart-you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world-then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess?
Or, conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“I am a woman. And I am seeking an attitude. I am trying to find reasons for pride.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“...love without being destroyed...”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“the motivation behind every sentence is the wish to say something real to somebody real.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“The expression of hatred for your enemies is sometimes the only way to end self-hatred.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder's image of us: three fifths of a human being.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“the problem of gender identity is our evasion of the implications of power and our may-I-say-“feminine” inclinations to make nice. War is not nice.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“Sure enough, we have plenty of exposure to white everything so why would we opt to remain our African/Asian/Mexican selves? The answer is that suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: There is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you--who you really are--do survive.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

“I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“I have come to believe that some patterns of resistance offer a better chance for victory than others. Both times I was raped I was by myself. I was isolated. I did not possess a manifest or an invisible-but-known-and-building-community. Both times I was shocked by what was happening as it was happening and, therefore, I lost force lost speed needed for resistance. And I think that costly paralysis of my shock directly devolved from my isolation, fro my not knowing other women who had been raped, from my not knowing that rape happens mostly between men that you take for granted as a friend part of your regular life and yourself, your body suddenly chosen for violent domination: Chosen for rape.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“Inside this volatile mix, a woman who had volunteered to help us, as needed, fell apart. She was, she is, an attorney... Rather than speak to the police, she started to tremble and cry. She said to me, "I can't. I can't do this. I'm just a single mother with three children." And so on. And it was awful to watch her fear making her powerless. It was awful. It was very depressing. And I thanked her for showing up, anyway. And I watched her retreat: Not blessed by a visible, known, tested, and building community on which she could rely, she felt, and therefore, she was isolated. She could not do herself, or anyone else, any good.

I think this has something to do with rape, which, I think has a lot to do with domination and the dominator's determination to deprive you of your rights.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“Meanwhile, I was making notes about what had seemed to work in the context of a showdown. I came up with this list: absence of fear; affirmation of self-worth; resolute holding to one's entitlement to the power one was exercising; manifest support; calls to other, not manifest support, such as sympathetic media, legal counsel, and kindred student organizations; and the stunning energy of rage.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“What is the moral meaning of our own gods?”
― June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays