JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Where I Live Now Less than a month ago, somebody wrote this on a wall at Fairfield University in Connecticut. "Fuck unity, you minorities. The white race is...
...But the fact of our common jeopardy was palpable, and as I listened to their modest demands for safety and representation, I felt almost calm: They were working it out...
...Minorities just cause problems, and we don't need them...
...Not nothing, but not a majority response, either...
...But a fifth of the student population had joined a demonstration against hatred...
...The white race is superior...
...Over here, in Berkeley, certain Americans approach other Americans in the supermarket or on the sidewalks asking "the other" Americans if they're in the United States legally, or not, and if they can prove whatever they say...
...Where I live now is the same place where, during the 1920s, an involuntary sterilization plan was conceived and implemented...
...As Governor, Wilson has accomplished quite a lot...
...So I arrived in Fairfield, Connecticut, feeling pretty low...
...The same experts who think I'm stupid believe that (c.f., The Handmaid's Tale) white women of the right genetic composition should be breeding more or that only such women should have babies—regardless of the wishes of these genetic superstars—if "the decline" or "the elevation" of "the intelligence" of "the race" is at stake...
...I think we should hang all blacks, chinks, and spies...
...In fact, only those suspicious-looking Asian-Americans tend to defeat white folks at their own game: that same old Stanford-Binet blah-blah that excuses me from my life, really, because, given my genetic deficiency, what can you expect of me, anyhow...
...all minorities don't leave F.U., me and my fellow brothers will start killing and raping minority bitches...
...And, of course, white is smart—very smart...
...I had arrived in Fairfield, Connecticut, barely twenty-four hours after California, the most populous and the largest and the most heterogeneous state of this Republic, re-elected Pete Wilson...
...Where I live now makes me wonder if Nazi Germany's night skies ever beheld a really big moon—a heavenly light that failed to dispel the cold and the bitter winds tormenting the darkness of earth below...
...None of these facts had changed: The KKK had not been captured or extirpated from their lives...
...I was looking at the students: Asian and African and Hispanic and Native American and white and mostly Catholic and mostly female...
...In the 1930s, the Nazis based their forced sterilization policies on the California model...
...All blacks should go to Africa, all chinks should go to hell, and all spies should get on their banana boats and go back to their island...
...They had to...
...And, conversely, one Mississippi politician ran for office by showing a poster of a black woman and her child: A vote for him was a vote against such an affront to eugenic considerations...
...Incidentally, at the rate of at least $25,000 a year, the cost of lifetime imprisonment—assuming forty years—is one million bucks...
...If by 10:30 a.m...
...He has espoused "three strikes and you're out" and now, with the passage of Proposition 184, that amazing idea has become a law meaning that, within ten years, California will spend 2.5 times more money on prisons than it will spend on education...
...Besides the heavy rain outside, Paul was telling me the whole deal of Aryan recruitment on the nearby beaches and anti-Semitism on campus and homophobic attacks, and I was wondering if I had really flown across the entire U.S.A., or was I just turning around and around in one spot: where I live now...
...And when I heard the news, I was dumbfounded: 57 percent of Asian-Americans, and 50 percent of African-Americans, and 30 percent of Latinos had voted for Proposition 187...
...Presumably I will be wasting my time if I report anybody who looks like Pete Wilson: White is not "suspect...
...He has established the bizarre notion of an "illegal alien" in the respectable discourse about the issue of immigration to this country, which is a country of Native Americans, African-Americans, and—everybody else, for damned sure—immigrants, or, in the case of Mexican-Americans/Chicanos, forcibly displaced indigenous peoples...
...He has further poisoned public debate through the deployment of TV commercials that depict Mexicans as crazed roaches swarming over and through and around defenseless toll booths and paralyzed highway traffic...
...Back home, it took awhile to get the stats...
...On the other side, my son was riding his bike from the University of Colorado-Boulder Law School library when a car full of white men tried to run him off the road as they made obscene suggestions about what he should do with himself...
...My host, a young white senior from Nashua, New Hampshire, Paul Kelley, handed me a copy of the KKK ultimatum to read, once I climbed into his four-by-four...
...A few days before this message (signed by "the KKK" and adorned by several swastikas), The New York Times committed the unnatural full weight of its Book Review to various popular exercises in behalf of white supremacy...
...Talk about critical ignorance and/or horribly successful disinformation...
...Where I live now is on the Western side of the Rockies...
...It was a small gathering in a small room...
...Boulder is where there are no Indians around but you do have a mania for 1 percent body fat, no smoking, and, also, threatening phone calls to a young Jewish couple who moved there, recently, and whose car has been vandalized...
...The next weekend, when I was speaking in Lexington, Kentucky, a white policeman there shot an unarmed eighteen-year-old black teenager in the head, and killed him...
...Let's unite and form a new generation of KKK...
...Where I live now there is just such a moon tonight—a useless, huge light above our perishing reasons for hope...
...To all my white brothers and sisters, let's take over what once was ours...
...June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...Curricular inclusion of anything resembling multicultural studies was years away...
...And, consistent with his "illegal alien" hysteria, Proposition 187, another new law in California, means that anyone who appears "suspicious" shall be reported to authorities and denied classroom/emergency room entry...
...But it was hard to concentrate...
Vol. 59 • January 1995 • No. 1
