Be Like June...

Be Like June . . .

by Mark Anthony Neal | Popmatters

[25 June 2002]

“And I Got to Thinking about the moral meaning of memory . . . [A]nd what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connections with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.”— June Jordan

It was a meandering Saturday afternoon—babygirl just finally down for her all-too-short afternoon nap—when I downloaded my latest batch of e-mail. Weekend e-mail is usually meaningless, no notes from editors, good words from respected colleagues, or queries from ambitious grad students—the stuff that always gets me excited—just the usual banter from the various listservs that rarely hold my attention. It was on one of those listservs that the news of June Jordan’s death was forwarded to me.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, Jordan was given a 40% prognosis of surviving more than five years. She lived for more than a decade after her diagnosis, becoming an advocate—on the real she had been an advocatefor the voiceless, the nameless, the faceless, and the despised for more than 30 years—for other women afflicted with the disease. The author of 28 books of poetry, fiction, and social criticism, Jordan was one of the most prolific intellectuals of her generation.

But I am sure there are many, of all races, who perused newspaper accounts of her death, with no knowledge of who this woman was . . . is. In a society that believes that inane dictums embraced by American youth like “Be Like Mike” or “I Am Tiger Woods” are evidence of a color-blind, classless, genderless, and discrimination-free America, June Jordan worked as an activist tirelessly in the very trenches that Nike, Gatorade, McDonalds, Viacom and two national political parties claim in the name of commercial products even more inane than pop slogans for the miraculously athletic black men that we know on a first name basis. We are unlikely to hear any slogans in mainstream media . . . Ever . . . that proclaim we should “be like June.”

To many in the mainstream, the very idea of a black intellectual is obscure, so it’s not surprising that Jordan’s death has received only nominal (usually 400 words) attention in the mainstream press. There is, of course, an all-too-long history of the invisibility of black death. The Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas hearings overshadowed the death of Redd Foxx in 1991. The most genius of American Modernist—Miles Davis—was only given his due in jazz circles, though he was the very definition of American style for more than four decades. One “witty” commentator even went as far to suggest that the Houghton family was out-of-line for their grandiose funeral arrangements for their daughter, pop singer Aaliyah (he was upset that traffic was backed up). Alluding to the lack of coverage of Miles Davis’s death, bassist Foley, joked on his 1993 track “Better Not Die (N Amerika Being Black)” that the media would have paid more attention if it was “Sonny or muthafuckin’ Cher” and of course Sonny Bono’s funeral (he was by then in the US Congress) was covered live on CNN.

In another example, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelrecently ran a story about the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, who was apparently kidnapped a month beforeElizabeth Smart’s disappearance in Salt Lake City, but there has been little if any mainstream media coverage of Patterson’s kidnapping. NBC, ABC and others have devoted more than 30 minutes of coverage to the Utah kidnapping. The intensity of the coverage of Smart immediately struck me as an effort to divert attention away from Bush Jr.‘s attempt to transform the American Government via the creation of a Dept. of Homeland Defense—black folks were of course diverted by the arrest of an accused child sex offender and R&B singer, who appears in a widely-circulated bootlegged copy of child pornography that has probably been seen by more people than those who have read at least one June Jordan book—but I digress.

If June Jordan has been invisible to the mainstream in her death, it was not simply because she was black, but because she was a black woman, who chose to be an activist and a intellectual, in a society that seemingly has little value for black women who aren’t taking off their clothes, while celebrating their “bootilicious” reality on a Viacom-owned video channel or an HBO “sex” series.

How ironic is it that there is little graphic sex on the channel’s Sex in the City which has no significant black female characters, yet black women are graphically featured on shows like Real Sex, the “hooker trilogy” of Hookers on the Point, Pimps Up, Hoes Down, Hookers at the Point: Five Years Later, and G-String Divas. Not surprisingly, HBO, which specializes in “groundbreaking” documentaries, passed on NO! , Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ brilliantly brave and important documentary about black-on-black sexual violence (some of those folks who have trafficked in child pornography via the R. Kelly video, need to spend a few hours with Simmons’s film), on the basis that it didn’t have mainstream appeal.

June Jordan was committed to exposing herself—her passions, convictions, and fears in her words, which she willfully gave to the world with the libretto I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and books such as Civil Wars, Selected Essays 1963-1980 (1996), and most recently her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood(1999). In her essay “Besting a Worse Case Scenario” (from Affirmative Action, 1998), Jordan wrote defiantly about her illness: “I want my story to help to raise red flags, public temperatures, holy hell, public consciousness, blood pressure, and morale—activist/research/victim/morale so that this soft-spoken emergency becomes the number-one-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue issue all kinds of people join to eradicate, this afternoon/tonight/Monday morning.” For a decade, Jordan used her own trauma to raise question as to why nearly 50,000 woman succumb to Breast Cancer per year.

Jordan was an avowed feminist, but like Joy James’s notion of black feminist “Shadow Boxers,” Jordan eschewed the “feminism as simply identity politics” that so-called feminists have been able to soft-pedal in the New York Times or on the best-sellers list. Jordan instead sought “analyses of the world-wide absurdity of endangered female existence” (from the introduction to the forthcoming collection Some of Us Did Not Die). She openly challenges women, asking “when will we revolt against our marginalized, pseudo-maverick status and assert our majority, our indispensable-to-the-species’ power—and I do mean power: our verifiable ability to change things inside our own lives and in the lives of other folks, as well.”

At the time of her death, an advanced copy of Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essay of June Jordan (scheduled for release in September of this year) sat in my bag, unread for close to a month. It was gonna be part of my “summer reading.” Jordan of course couldn’t afford simple pleasures like planning her summer reading. In a poignant moment in “Besting a Worse case Scenario” Jordan wrote:

I do everything I possibly can every day,
I postpone nothing
I no longer procrastinate.
I give whatever I undertake all that I’ve got
I pay closer attention to incredible,
surrounding reasons for celebration and faith
I watch for good news.
I become hourly more aware
Of the privileges conveyed by human life . . .

It has been a privilege for all those who have read Jordan’s work or have known and worked with her, to have shared some part of her humanity. Jordan was of course right, when she suggested that “some of us did not die.” The essay was written weeks after the 9-11 attacks, as Jordan struggled with the implications of the attacks and American response to them. Ultimately, she asserted (borrowing from Auschwitz survivor Elly Gross) that “We’re Still Here / I Guess It Was Our Destiny To Live / So Let’s get on with it!” For those us still in the world, it would do us well to “Be Like June Jordan.”

Published at: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/020625-jordanjune/

Pink Ribbons, Black Bruises

Pink Ribbons, Black Bruises

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

October is both Breast Cancer Awareness Month as well as Domestic Abuse Awareness Month and, on the surface, the two seem to have little in common except concern for the quality of women's lives. Most men understand that breast cancer and domestic violence represent forms of crisis in the lives of black women, but I'd like to suggest that our dismissive attitude towards women's health care issues represent a form of abuse itself.

According to the Chicago Foundation for Women "violence against women and girls is a cradle-to-grave epidemic." The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community at the University of Minnesotafound that black women were 30 percent more likely to be subject to domestic violence than white women and 250 percent more likely to be the subject of such violence than men. Additionally, black women account for more than 20 percent of the homicides associated with domestic violence despite only representing 8 percent of the national population.

Thankfully, there is now a generation of men, including activists and educators like Jackson Katz, Quentin Walcott, director of the CONNECT's Community Empowerment Program in New York, Ulester Douglass of Men Stopping Violence in Georgia and filmmaker Byron Hurt who are providing leadership in getting men of all races to understand their complicity in violence against women. It is still a struggle to get men to speak out against violence against women, but the aforementioned men represent tremendous growth in that regard.

Thanks to organizations like Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the foundation behind the pink ribbons and wrist bands so prominently featured during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, society is beginning to grapple with the disproportionate effect of the disease on black women, who, while less likely to get the disease than their white peers, are far more likely to die from it.  Indeed it is heartening to see professional sports leagues like the NFL and Major League Baseball contribute to awareness efforts.

There are lots of reasons for the discrepancies between black and white women, but I'd like to highlight the roles that black women play as caretakers and nurturers in our communities. Also, black women are seemingly more willing to address the high incidence of hypertension and prostate disease among black men, often at the expense of addressing their own health issues.

Ironically, few black men seem to take the same interest in black women's health concerns, or their own health issues for that matter. Men have been socialized to think of diseases like breast cancer, fibroids and osteoporosis, as simply examples of "women's diseases." Some men are likely to dismiss diseases that disproportionately affect women, because they were told as boys that it was "mommy's time of the month," distancing them from women's health issues. Nevertheless, black men must take greater responsibility in increasing their awareness of diseases that afflict their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and friends.

For example, some studies have shown that 80 percent of all black women suffer from some form of fibroid disease, yet most black men are oblivious to the effects of the disease. Could you imagine a disease that afflicted 80 percent of black men that black women would be largely ignorant of?

In many ways our willing ignorance about black women's health issues represents a form of abuse. As healthcare issues remain critical to black America, it is incumbent on black men to get serious about finding out about the diseases that affect the women and men in our communities.

Pink Ribbons for Black Women

Pink Ribbons for Black Women
by Mark Anthony Neal

In 1979, R&B singer Minnie Riperton died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-one. With a five-octave vocal range, Riperton was best known for songs like “Memory Lane ” and “Lovin’ You.” (She’s also the mother of Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph). However, for many Americans in the 1970s, Riperton was more than just an incredible singer, but the public face of breast cancer.

Riperton understood that with celebrity came responsibility, so she publicly announced her trauma on national television, confiding in Tonight Show guest host Flip Wilson-and the rest of the country. Riperton would soon become the first African-American public spokesperson for the American Cancer Society, receiving the organization’s “Courage Award” at a White House ceremony with then-President Jimmy Carter. Nearly thirty years after her death, black women continue to be at the forefront of preventative outreach efforts.

In comparison to white women, black women are less likely to get breast cancer. However, black women are far more likely to die from it, in many cases because they are typically diagnosed at a much later stage than are white women. In addition, white women have longer survival rates once they contract the disease, even while black women are diagnosed at younger ages. To further complicate the situation, cancer tumors found in black women tend to be more aggressive than those found in white women.

Among the more obvious reasons for these discrepancies is that black women, particularly poor black women, often don’t have the same healthcare resources that their white peers do. The National Cancer Institute suggests that even when black women do have access to healthcare, they are less likely to receive state-of-the-art diagnostic treatments and procedures.

Also, the health issues of black men are often more prominently addressed than those of black women. Thus, concerns about breast cancer among black women are often overshadowed by legitimate concerns for the high incidence of hypertension and prostate disease among black men, even though such diseases also disproportionately affect black women as well.

In the spirit of Minnie Riperton’s work three decades ago, Susan G. Komen for the Cure (the foundation responsible for the ubiquitous pink ribbons during Breast Cancer Awareness Month) began the “Circle of Promise” campaign to mobilize awareness about breast cancer in the black community, dispel myths that prevent black women from seeking early treatment and empower black women to become strong advocates for themselves and their loved ones. Susan G. Komen for the Cure estimates that in 2007, nearly 20,000 black women were diagnosed with breast cancer and more than 5,000 succumbed to the disease.

To help spread the word, the Circle of Promise campaign has employed the talents of a group of national ambassadors, including actress Gabrielle Union, artist Synthia Saint James, health expert Dr. Rovenia Brock and vocalist Lalah Hathaway (daughter of the late soul legend Donny Hathaway).

When asked about her involvement with Circle of Promise, Hathaway states, “I call it my grown-up job. It charges me to talk with women, particularly African-American women, about their health, because breast cancer is killing us at such an alarming rate. We’re always the last to be diagnosed and the first to die.”