Be Like June

By Mark Anthony Neal, PopMatters. Posted July 2, 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 percent 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 advocate for 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 defintion 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 Sentinel recently ran a story about the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, who was apparently kidnapped a month before Elizabeth 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.

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