"Most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. 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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from the United StatesLGBT rights activists20th-century poets from the United StatesWomen activists from the United StatesActivists from New York City
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Some of Us Did Not Die (2003)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/June_Jordan
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
June Jordan
June Millicent Jordan (9 July 1936 – 14 June 2002) was an African-American bisexual political activist, writer, poet, essayist, and teacher, born in Harlem, New York, to Jamaican immigrants.
37 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by June Jordan →
Related Quotes
"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say th…"
"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view a…"
"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the moun…"
"I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide …"
"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and polit…"
"Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations."
"I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, wh…"
"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable."
"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what…"
"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)…"