On Call Quotes

“I believe that suffering does not confer virtue upon the victim. Hence it is possible that the slave will become the slaveholder and that the victim will become the executioner.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we 'neither sought nor knew,' as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“For a long time I believe we supposed that the problem was that of misinformation. If only Americans knew the truth of things then they would rally to help, to stop the invasion, the slaughter. What I gradually began to understand, however, was something importantly different. The problem was not one of misinformation, or ignorance. The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Unless you accept white male standards of conduct, standards that castigate women for our 'emotionality,' our tears, our tendencies to take human life and responsible love quite seriously, why would you applaud any woman for remaining 'calm' in an outrageous circumstance?”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Rather than struggling to share in a patently evil kind of power, the power of people who will demean and destroy those who are weaker than they, I think we might, more usefully, have sought to redefine that meaning of power, altogether.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“If we collaborate with the powerful then our language will lose its currency as a means to tell the truth in order to change the truth.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Not too many people wanted to grant that maybe schools are political institutions teaching power to the powerful and something unpalatable and destructive to the weak. Not too many people wanted to reexamine their fantasies about the democratizing function of American education.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Whole campaign an' dint neither one of them joker talk about right or wrong. We knowed it was trouble. We been livin' with trouble for awhile.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“The possessive case scarcely ever appears in Black English. Never use an apostrophe ('s) construction. If you wander into a possessive case component of an idea, then keep logically consistent: ours, his, theirs, mines. But, most likely, if you bump into such a component, you have wandered outside the underlying world-view of Black English.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes? How could these people living in this poor country where so many dreams arise from the facts of so much horror, how could they ever hurt me or any of us, up here, in the chill indifference of North America? They have given to me and to all of us an amazing example of self-love. With their bodies and their blood they have shown us the bravery that self-love requires.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“These days, when the eagle want ssomething for lunch, he usually screams 'Communists!' or 'Cuba!' or 'National security!' In the old days, however, he used to solemnly say 'gold' or 'slaves' or 'Civilization,' and then these words would produce a great bustling of imperial energies, as newly marked areas of the map became targets for conquest and imperial exploitation.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“If other First World people, if we, ourselves, took a notion to think and act just according to what we felt was good for us, if we thought and if we acted as though the big guys should just take a flying jump out of the nearest window whenever they come pushing their craziness into our countries, our houses, our heads, the whole world would soon become really different really fast.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“It occurs to me that much organizational grief could be avoided if people understood that partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership for change: When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“And when these concepts of race and class and gender absolutely collapse is whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become 'a person,' those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language lead us into the equality of power that a democratic state must represent.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“Most Americans have imagined that problems affecting Black life follow from pathogenic attributes of Black people and not from malfunctions of the state. Most Americans have sought to identify themselves with the powerful interests that oppress poor and minority peoples, perhaps hoping to keep themselves on the shooting side of the target range.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays

“I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.”
― June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays