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"I'm saying let's make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!"
..."Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!"
Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan's essay, "The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage (2001)'
June Jordan, noted Black feminist writer and activist, consistently called our attention to the lines that divide us be they de facto racial segregation or rigorously policed national borders - throughout her poetry, essays, and novels that span the last thirty years. In her recent autobiography, she describes her experience of being one of the first AfricanAmericans to enroll (on scholarship) at previously all white elite private schools, "I was the 'only' one...I felt outnumbered. I was surrounded by 'them.' And there was no 'we.' There was only 'me.' I didn't like it."2 Her subsequent career is marked by attempts to build real collectivity amidst diverse constituents from her own experience of crossing social and political borders into potentially hostile terrain. In her third collection of essays, Technical Difficulties: AfricanAmerican Notes on the State of the Union (1992), Jordan proposes a Manifest New Destiny to achieve equity for those members of the American polity who often find themselves under siege by nativist and ethnocentric nationalist discourses, and sometimes by actions of the nation-state itself. Immigration scholar Mae Ngai chronicles how such outsiders within national borders construct the boundaries of American-ness itself, especially the figure of "alien citizens": persons who may be formal American citizens (whether by birth or by naturalization) but who are nevertheless presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by state practices on the look out for illegal aliens.3 In response, rather than let invocations of the authority of the nation-state ensnare those who are caught inside its hostile borders, Jordan reclaims the very language of democracy. Jordan draws on the experiences of refugees, those once discussed as "The Negro Problem," American Japanese in the 1940s, and displaced Native Americans in her response to the violent expansionist project of American Manifest Destiny. Rather than solely protest the historical devastation of an American border that...