Waiting for a Taxi
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Waiting for a Taxi We weren't doing anything. We hadn't hurt anybody, and we didn't want to. We were on holiday. We had studied maps of the city and taken...
...I consider myself fortunate, therefore, to keep coming upon immediate, personal events that challenge my inclinations toward a politics as preoccupied with the known old enemies as it is alert to the potential for new allies...
...One driver actually stopped and then, suddenly, he sped away almost taking with him the arm of one of my companions who had been about to open the door to his taxi...
...The sides, apparently, were Young Black Man versus Young White Woman...
...Among ourselves, we extolled the seductive intelligence and sensual style of this Paris, this magical place to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, this obvious place to sit back with a good glass of wine and think about a world lit by longings for Liberte, Egalite, Frater-nite...
...For those of us born into a historically scorned and jeopardized status, our bodily survival testifies to the defensively positive meanings of race and class identity because we have created these positive implications as a source of self-defense...
...From the torn sky of Antarctica to the Port of Valdez in Alaska, we need vigilant, international agencies empowered to assure the survival of our life-supporting environments...
...Both forms of analysis encourage exaggerated—or plainly mistaken—suppositions about racial or class grounds for political solidarity...
...I am looking for an umbrella big enough to overcome the tactical and moral limitations of "identity politics"—politics based on gender, class, or race...
...By then, we were forty-five minutes late, and on arrival we saw five middle-aged white women heading away towards an old car across the street...
...After our lunch, we drove to the Liverpool public library, where I was scheduled to read...
...I felt mortified by the contrast between what would allow me, a black woman from America, to feel happy and the late and minimal amenities that could ease the daily experience of a white woman living in England...
...I do not agree that the skin color of a female victim shall alienate me from a gender sense of unity and peril...
...As far as I can tell, the young white woman had been raped and she was certain, if mistaken, about the face and the voice of her assailant...
...June Jordan women terrified by the prospect of overstaying a union-guaranteed hour for lunch...
...On the basis of class alone, Ruth's mother might very well distrust or resent me...
...They do not presuppose an evil any one of us must seek to extirpate...
...Oh," Ruth told me, instantly switching subjects but not altering her bright and proselytizing tone, "my mother is very happy...
...These habits may, for example, correlate race with class in monolithic, absolute ways: i.e., white people have, black people have not, or, poor people equals black people...
...I brought with me a selection of my poetry that includes poems written during the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Revolution...
...And that's the trick of it: No one will say "no" to freely given admiration and respect...
...I had lost my appetite, by now, completely, and I could not comprehend the evident cheer-iness of Ruth, who had moved on in conversation to describe the building success of the Africa Art Collective in Liverpool that she co-directs...
...I do not agree that the genuine gender concerns that I embody shall alienate me from a racial sense of unity and peril...
...I believe there is a likelihood of mistaken identification on the part of the victim...
...I was happy...
...Behind us, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart glowed ivory and gorgeous in a flattering wash of artificial, mellow light...
...There is available to me a moral attachment to a concept beyond gender and race...
...These last hours of our last full day in Paris seemed to roll and slide into pleasure and surprise...
...I had heard about the poverty characteristic of much of Liverpool, but I was not ready for what I encountered face to face...
...But then we tried to get a cab to stop for us, and we failed...
...It was late...
...I looked at them...
...I am referring to the concept of justice, which I am prepared to embrace and monitor so that justice shall equally serve the young black man and the young white woman...
...Equally important, any exclusive mode of analysis will overlook, or obviate, the genuine potential for political unity across class and race boundaries...
...I was stunned to learn that yet another female student, of whatever color, had been raped...
...They seemed to assume I would commit myself to one side or the other, automatically...
...And yet, many of us persist in our race/ class habits of thought...
...We have wrested, we have invented positive consequences from facts of unequal conflict, facts of oppression...
...And she has a telephone...
...Although understandable, these dominating habits of thought tend to deny the full functions of race and class, both...
...When they recognized me, the women came over and apologized: They were really sorry, they said, but they had to leave or they'd get in trouble on the job...
...But these are my opinions merely...
...I declined to make any public comment: I do not yet know what the truth of this terrible matter may be...
...On the basis of race alone, I might very well be inclined to distrust or resent Ruth's mother...
...One message kept recurring: A young black man—the son, in fact, of a colleague—had been accused of raping a young white woman...
...I was thinking that, as a matter of fact, the more things change, the more things change...
...Ruth's mother, of course, is white...
...Many of us function on the basis of habits of thought that automatically concede paramount importance to race or class...
...Focusing on racial or class or gender attributes will yield only distorted and deeply inadequate images of ourselves...
...Grass, stars, and sunlight all enjoy self-evident, positive connotations, everywhere on the planet...
...This was a miserable conclusion to a day of so much tourist privilege and delight, a day of feeling powerful because to be a sightseer is to be completely welcome among strangers...
...We hurried along, punch-drunk with happiness and fatigue...
...But there is a route out of the paralysis of identity politics, even here, in this ugly, heartbreaking crisis...
...And for additional pennies, her mother was given soiled sanitary napkins to launder by hand...
...Traditional calls to "unity" on the basis of only one of these factors—race or class or gender—will fail, finally, and again and again, I believe, because no simple one of these components provides for a valid fathoming of the complete individual...
...But somebody, pretty soon, needs to be talking, sisterly and brotherly, with the taxi drivers of the world, as well...
...I thought and I said that it was I who should apologize: I was late...
...I rejoice to see that last year, more than eight million American voters—black and white and Latino and Asian and Native American and straight and gay and lesbian and working-class and Ivy League—voted for Jesse Jackson...
...And June Jordan appears in this space every other month...
...I got up from my desk and snatched the nearest newspaper I could find...
...One of my hosts was Ruth Grosvenor, a young black woman who described herself, at lunch, as a half-caste IrishCaribbean...
...I felt honored by their open-mindedness in having wanted to come and listen to my poetry...
...Yes, I am exhilarated by the holiday I enjoyed with my friends, and I am proud of the intimate camaraderie we shared...
...And yet, identity politics aside, we both had infinitely more to gain as possible comrades joined against socioeconomic inequities than we could conceivably benefit from hostilities exchanged in serious ignorance of each other...
...I was thinking that if we, all of us black, all of us women, all of us deriving from connected varieties of peasant/immigrant/ persecuted histories of struggle and significant triumph, if we could find and trust each other enough to travel together into a land where none of us belonged, nothing on Earth was impossible any more...
...Habits of racial and class analyses also deny universal functions of gender which determine at least as much, if not more, about any citizen's psychological, economic, and physical life-force and well-being...
...Every one of them was wearing an inexpensive, faded housedress and, over that, a cheap and shapeless cardigan sweater...
...Returning to the recent rainy evening in Paris, I am still looking for an umbrella big enough to overcome the tactical and moral limitations of identity politics...
...And I cannot comprehend why or how anyone would expect me to choose between my gender and racial identities...
...There is another realm of possibility: political unity and human community based upon concepts that underlie or supersede relatively immutable factors of race, class, and gender: the concept of justice, the concept of equality, the concept of tenderness...
...Race and class, then, are not the same kinds of words as grass and stars...
...I rejoice at this good news, this happy evidence of moral and tactical outreach and response beyond identity politics...
...The message, as delivered by my secretary, was this: Call so and so at once about the young black man who supposedly raped some white woman...
...I was appalled by the accusation leveled against the son of my colleague...
...This is getting us where all of us need to go...
...I do not agree that the mistaken accusation of a black man is less than a very serious crime...
...We had studied maps of the city and taken hundreds of photographs...
...To speak with Ruth's mother, to speak for Ruth's mother, I would certainly have to eschew facile notions of race and class correlation...
...It was raining...
...It was dark...
...We tried again, and then again...
...I needed to know more...
...We know the negative, the evil origins, the evil circumstances that have demanded our development of race and class analyses...
...I felt a kind of nausea overtaking me as I reread the phone messages...
...But we are creatures of habit...
...They are physical phenomena unencumbered by our knowledge or our experience of slavery, discrimination, rape, and murder...
...What has happened to her...
...But now we had asked for something in return—a taxi...
...This column was adapted from "Beyond Gender, Race, and Class," a speech she delivered in April at the Eighth Annual Gender Studies Symposium, "Visions and Voices for Change," at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon...
...She remarried, and she has her own little flat, at last...
...As best I could tell, the young black student could not have raped anybody...
...I rejoice to see that 300,000 people demonstrated for pro-choice rights in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1989...
...I am searching for the language of a new political consciousness of identity...
...Gender is not the same kind of noun as sunlight...
...Or, if we attend primarily to factors of class, then we may mislead ourselves significantly by ignoring privileges inherent to white identity, per se, or the socially contemptible status of minority-group members regardless of class...
...I am wondering if those of us who began our lives in difficult conditions defined by our race or our class or our gender identities, I am wondering if we can become more carefully aware of the limitations of race and class and gender analyses, for these yield only distorted and deeply inadequate images of ourselves...
...I do not agree that rape is less serious than any other heinous felony...
...I am looking for a way to catch a taxi...
...We had walked ourselves dizzy and stared at the other visitors and stammered out our barely Berlitz versions of a beautiful language...
...Less than a month ago, I traveled to Liverpool, England, for the first time...
...It was I who felt, moreover, unprepared: What in my work, to date, deserves the open-minded attention of blue-collar white Solidarity for Angela Even then in the attenuated Light of the Church of Le Sacre Coeur (early evening and folk songs on the mausoleum steps) and armed only with 2 Instamatic cameras (not a terrorist among us) even there in that Parisian downpour four Black women (2 of Asian 2 of African descent) could not catch a taxi and I wondered what umbrella would be big enough to stop the shivering of our collective impotence up against such negligent assault And I wondered who would build that shelter who will build and lift it high and wide above such loneliness...
...And I believe that such a mistake, if that is the case, will have created a second victim, the wrongly accused black student...
...But," I interrupted, "what about your mother...
...Two and a half weeks after Liverpool, I sat sorting through my messages and mail at the university where I teach...
...And why is that...
...Facts such as I am black, or I do not have much money, or I am Lithuanian, or I am Senegalese, or I am a girl, or my father mends shoes, become necessary and crucial facts of race and class and gender inside the negative contexts of unequal conflict and the oppression of one group by another, the oppression of somebody weak by somebody more powerful...
...with that single, ordinary request, the problems of our identity, our problems of power, reappeared and trashed our holiday confidence and joy...
...I asked her for more detail about her family background, and she told me about her mother, who had grown up in Ireland so poor she regularly used to dig in the pig bins, searching for scraps of edible garbage...
...Of that 300,000, an estimated 100,000 who stood up for women's rights were men...
...It is that concept and it is on behalf of both the primary and the possible second victim of yet another on-campus rape that I am willing to commit my energies and my trust...
...We had marveled at the convenient frequency of the Metro and devoured vegetarian crepes from a sidewalk concession...
...On the other hand, the hideous despoiling of Prince William Sound in Alaska, the Exxon spill of ten million gallons of oil contaminating 3,000 square miles of those previously clear and lovely waters, makes plain the total irrelevance— the dismal inadequacy—of identity politics, or even national politics...
...he has several witnesses who establish him off campus throughout the evening of the alleged assault...
...If we defer mainly to race, then what about realities of class that point to huge numbers of poor white people or severe differences of many kinds among various, sometimes conflicting classes of black people...
Vol. 53 • June 1989 • No. 6
