JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Where Is the Sisterhood! It eats at my heart. I can't get it out of my head that mothers throw away, or drown, or suffocate, their baby girls. This happens in...
...Where is the movie about Ms...
...When you interlink this contempt with female infanticide and the increasing popularity of interrupting pregnancy if, otherwise, a baby girl will be born, you guarantee the mute evaporation of hundreds of millions of female lives ahead of us...
...And the lethal brutality that befalls those of us carrying No Name into the world is no longer, anywhere, theoretical...
...The United Nations 1995 Reportonthe World's Women, Trends and Statistics begins with this stunning announcement: "There are fewer women in the world than men...
...By which I meant that I was his new friend, his political sister: a black woman willing and able to love and admire him...
...Sen calculates the shocking, awesome, number of deaths implied by inequality and neglect, and arrives at her estimate of "more than 100 million women missing"— more than 100 million female lives extinguished by contempt...
...Where was she heading when she died...
...Why do we keep silent when the so-called Welfare Queen comes up...
...My cousin carried my uncle's name, but without his love his name conferred no safety, no promise of familial esteem...
...report...
...Snoop Doggy Dog, Patrick Buchanan, Timothy McVeigh, or yet another movie showing black women in BMW convertibles and expensive clothes, with zero political consciousness, zero community usefulness...
...In the newsprint photo of Mei Ming, suffering has consumed her...
...Her executioners were neither Western nor white...
...I want to pursue the collective, and the creative, securement of all of our legitimate names for all of our...
...And we need to exorcise inertia from our notions of acceptable behavior, or even belated self-criticism will lapse into mere embroidery upon comfortable habits of self-absorption...
...But none of this attention will resurrect that child...
...Hatred opens up an inhumane temptation for every kind of people on Earth...
...She was just a girl...
...I could not call myself a name that would compel his nonviolent recognition and respect...
...I am calling for a righteous redefinition of affirmative action so that we will attend to emergency issues specific to female life, as well as issues adhering to bedeviled constructs of racial identity...
...Any affirmative action deserving our faith and our hard work must militate against the perishing of the female of our species...
...Why is it that all black women do not declare ourselves The Welfare Queens United...
...Would your or my multicultural studies include or omit this information...
...Chinese infant Mei Ming, which means No Name in Mandarin, was recently found decomposing inside a Chinese orphanage, where she had been left to perish without food or any other kind of care...
...And where is ihe sislerhood...
...I could not call myself a name that he would have to answer with his own...
...She died and she lived with No Name...
...That perishing, that endanger-ment, remains, shamelessly, hidden...
...Where is the sisterhood...
...These dead children died nameless, belonging nowhere in particular...
...Systematic, careless, and traditional hatred of female life leads, inexorably, to gender genocide, and nothing less than that...
...In this sense, self-criticism is way overdue...
...Why is this years-ago-documented loss of female life nevertheless "news" in 1996...
...Where is the sisterhood...
...Fannie Lou Hamer...
...When my Uncle Teddy called his wife about their newborn baby, and when his wife, my aunt, told him she'd given birth to a baby girl, my Uncle Teddy exclaimed, "There must be some mistake...
...And the problem is this: Between Nobody Real and Nobody Real, every imaginable violation, every imaginable violence, seems distant, or abstract, and therefore, possibly unreal, and, therefore unimportant, or impossible to interdict...
...Seven years ago, twelve-year-old African-American Bracola Coleman was found dead on her kitchen floor...
...I was just a girl...
...finally, legitimate lives...
...Where is the sisterhood...
...Or when we read about a young black mother terrified and bullied into jumping off a bridge...
...India, China, Africa are not white, Western countries...
...Is there any amazingly difficult research still to be accomplished before we discover that AFDC adds up to 1 percent of the national budget, and that there are more white women on welfare than black women, and that there is no statistical proof that children raised by their single mothers do more poorly than children of Patrick Buchanan's parents...
...Every single one of us is No Name in the universe of somebody else who is No Name to you and me...
...Is there any doubt about the sadistic and boastful scapegoating of black women who raise children by ourselves and then ask for recognition, respect, and sometimes assistance...
...When it became clear that my new friend, the African-American head of the local NAACP, intended to rape me, I tried to stop him by asking: "Do you know who I am...
...Building upon affirmative action as we have first conceived of it, we should now move against our own legacies of acquiescence, complicity, hatefulness, and cowardice...
...This happens in India, and Africa, and China, which is to say that coming into the world female is extremely hazardous inside the majority cultures of our species...
...Where is the sisterhood...
...We cannot say of twelve-year-old Bracola Coleman, "She's dead...
...What did she ever laugh about...
...She is emaciated, diseased...
...We cannot even say of Mei Ming, "She's dead...
...My uncle could not kill his daughter by phone, but she killed herself years later, in a tailspin of belief in her own worthless-ness...
...Why did no one protect her from this last unmitigated desecration of her body...
...Then, perhaps, I can hope, at last, to find something possibly useful, possibly affirmative to saw In the name of Bracola Coleman and Mei Ming, who perished unknown among us, I commit my heart and my mind to this further, lifelong, student undertaking...
...Bracola Coleman and my cousin Lynnsely Rutledge did not yield to white...
...Why are there voluminous surveys and findings pertinent to young black men but no comparable intelligence available about black women and young black girls...
...As a female member of our endangered species, I am searching for relevant proof of sisterhood: I am searching for relevant proof of brotherhood hinged to that sisterhood...
...In an ancillary but earlier 1992 U.N...
...On the other hand, the calculated starvation and abandonment of Mei Ming has received international attention as the existence of "dying rooms" for unwanted children, particularly unwanted baby girls, becomes more and more appallingly documented...
...I need to establish my legitimate name inside the consciousness of strangers...
...The violence of the affliction of No Name could not be more clearly conveyed...
...Or when we hear about the genital mutilation of girls...
...And nobody knows how she was born or where, or who she might have wanted to become or why...
...We know nothing about Mei Ming except the meaning of her name...
...We did not know them and, therefore, could not save them from their ignominious existence...
...She" never existed for us...
...He silenced me with violence...
...This documented, but utterly disregarded, vanishing of female life has taken place all around us, and recently...
...Before, or after, watching what on TV...
...Evidently, she had been fatally wounded by a broomstick jammed into her vagina...
...Denied and despised, these children died from No Name...
...I need to learn the legitimate names of the strangers surrounding me...
...The violation and murder of Bracola Coleman received negligible coverage...
...I am saying America is not colorblind, but evil is...
...she June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...These dead children should summon us to a further commitment, building upon affirmative action and its original, limited aims...
...In a 1990 New York Review of Books article entitled, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," the writer, Amartya Sen, reports that gainful employment is decisive in the determination of female longevity and that unequal nutrition and unequal health care correlate with the declining ratio of women to men...
...Her life and her death elicited equal neglect...
...Western assault...
...Whoever we are, we need to interact actively with all of our cultures of origin...
...had no name of her own, no claim to legitimate, beloved standing in the world...
...Who...
...And that endangerment flourishes inside the majority cultures of the world—African, Indian, and Chinese...
...We know the tool of her annihilation, but we do not know who she was alive: On what street and up which stairs and near or far from what refrigerator with cheese or Pepsi or beer inside, did she live...
...The Sexual Age Distribution of the Worlds Population, we leam that men have outnumbered women, worldwide, since 1965...
...I believe that righteous affirmative action means that we extirpate all historical hatred attached to our names—whether that brutal negativity points to a slavemaster, the manager of a brothel or young children for sale, an uncle...
...And, in the context of genocide, what will affirmative action require...
...If we do not join together for the sake of the neediest among us, then what is the purpose of our unity...
Vol. 60 • June 1996 • No. 6
