JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Where Is the Rage? Even among people who still use the "L word" to describe themselves, trashing the 1960s as some kind of huge, juvenile mistake has become quite...
...Three of the worst rulings are these: ¶ Ward's Cove v. Atonio, which pretty much immunizes the concept of "business necessity" from fair-play scrutiny and assessment...
...I think none of us—hindsight wizards that we are—none of us has proven ourselves nearly as wise, as effective, as persevering as the myriad and mostly anonymous Americans who fought to desegregate the privileges of freedom and who stopped a war...
...Taken together, these particular Court findings dispute or disregard the separate and altogether unequal histories of women and minorities...
...I do not believe that we can restore and expand the freedoms that our lives require unless and until we embrace the justice of our rage...
...And they have extended the death penalty, and they have further curtailed the legal prerogatives of prisoners...
...seven successful attacks against affirmative-action policies and guidelines...
...But nowhere...
...so far, in this commercial retrospective on a decade as radical and as consequential as that great American afterthought, the Bill of Rights, nowhere can we find properly respectful efforts to identify the distinctive mass attributes that led to a revolution in civil rights at home and a callback of the troops from abroad...
...Now that the Supreme Court has removed itself from humane and democratic functions of the law, shall we persist in beggarly petitions to that agency...
...Given the coming consequences of these decisions, public response has been mild...
...I was livid...
...Or we encounter the perversities of history denied (e.g., Mississippi Burning) or we flinch from the well-meant but certainly jejune manipulation of "Martin," "Malcolm," and Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, in the brave new world according to Spike Lee (e.g., Do the Right Thing...
...Should we surrender our grievances and wither away in civil silence...
...They constitute a racist and sexist assault upon millions of Americans even as they try to deny the reality and meaning of such social disease...
...At the end of its 1989 deliberations, the Court could point to no fewer than June Jordan appears in this space every other month...
...And, most remarkably, Martin v. Wilks, which allows for "reverse discrimination" suits brought by white men, for instance, who might, otherwise, discover themselves a little bit penalized for laziness or inattention...
...And, instead, basic supports for our rightful autonomy as individual citizens, basic guarantees, and bitterly contested entitlements have been taken away from us...
...And, along with a decisive number of other Americans, I was ready for whatever it took to exorcise the hideous power of that hideous hatred from my life...
...If we had anything going for us, anything remotely commensurate to the depth and the force of those now almost unimaginable ten years, we, consequently, would also have universal health care, or a Federal megahousing program, or children in totally nonabusive child-care situations, or all of the above, at the least...
...I can remember the rage that convulsed my body and my mind and my imagination when I learned about the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the murder of those black children...
...They ridicule the grief that underlies the call for reparations or redress...
...Reproductive choice is not some trendy item to toss or keep around the house...
...In addition, the conservative five-justice majority has jeopardized reproductive choice earlier secured for women in Roe v. Wade...
...But "affirmative action" is not an academic subject for comfortable debate...
...Depriving me of my freedom or murdering Vietnamese families in my name was neither unkind nor ineluctable...
...Even among people who still use the "L word" to describe themselves, trashing the 1960s as some kind of huge, juvenile mistake has become quite commonplace...
...Have the streets and the highways and the bridges of America closed down...
...We stood, immovable, because we believed we were right...
...But maybe that's okay...
...Warren v. AT&T Technologies, which protects the principle of "seniority" from antidiscrimination challenges to undue work-force homogeneity...
...We need these conditions of being alive every bit as much as we need not to be shot through the head by a sheriff determined to block black voter registration...
...If you cannot get an education or a job, if you cannot choose what will or will not happen with your own body, then what freedom do you have...
...And, if we do not change the language of current political discourse, if we do not reintroduce a Right and Wrong, a Good or Evil measurement of doers and deeds, then how shall we, finally, argue our cause...
...The Sixties worked because we knew that the absence of civil rights did not amount to "tragic" circumstances...
...It was wrong...
...He does not equivocate...
...The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity—the incredibly outgoing energy—of righteous rage...
...Such plaintiffs can now make their lamentations any number of years after the allegedly objectionable "affirmative action" has taken place...
...That was evil...
...They beat up black students, they burn abortion clinics, they hound television stations, art galleries, and legislators in a fearsome fervor...
...That's a lot of damage...
...Since "The Sixties," what have we accomplished, exactly...
...He does not mourn the loss of any battle...
...And I know that the extraordinary tumult of that time produced more freedom in our daily and collective lives than ever imagined by most of us standing shoulder to shoulder and holding hands and singing those songs that seem embarrassing today...
...I do not recall any equivocal emotion in my heart...
...Is it better to scream or to die...
...Have we lost heart...
...That was wrong...
...The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress...
...I think it's about that time...
...We used a different language back then...
...And, blithely, they overturn humane functions of the law as it relates to the weak who cannot procure alternatives to state protection of their interests...
...Today, it is the American Right that stands, immovable, because Jesse Helms really believes in the moral rectitude of his perspectives and his vision...
...An upfront moral formulation of the issues did not hurl us into quandaries of rhetoric: The American Left was right, and the rest of America was wrong...
...In other words, no statute of limitations controls such shameless claims to injury...
...Superficiality, distortion, and denial constitute neither wonderful nor heinous events, per se...
...Can we not take to them in anger and in expectation of relief...
...And they get what they want, more and more frequently...
...he and his kinsmen become enraged...
...Iremember the 1960s as first and last en-flamed by mass demands for freedom...
...If we are afraid to insist we are right, then what...
...Purporting to reflect our general response, the media have characterized these brutal decrees as "tragic...
...But we possess none of these necessities...
Vol. 53 • October 1989 • No. 10
