Life & Wisdom Quote by June Jordan

To live "at the mercy" of other people's formulations is to be governed not by laws or even by money, but by somebody else's storyline about what counts. June Jordan writes that word, "Consequently", like a gavel: this is the aftershock of a system already in motion. The sentence doesn’t plead for freedom in the abstract; it names the mechanism by which freedom gets quietly foreclosed - the outsourced calendar of priorities, the inherited definitions of success, propriety, safety, even "relevance."

Jordan’s intent is both diagnostic and insurgent. She’s pointing to a soft form of domination: when institutions, media, and social norms set the terms of importance, people spend their finite lives chasing someone else’s metrics and calling it choice. The subtext is especially sharp for those already pushed to the margins. If you’re Black, queer, a woman, poor - categories Jordan moved through with clear-eyed anger and lyric precision - "other people" is not a neutral audience. It’s a power bloc that can misname you, shrink you, and then punish you for failing to fit the misdescription.

The phrasing matters. "Formulations" is clinical, almost bureaucratic, suggesting that "importance" isn’t discovered but manufactured - drafted, edited, circulated. Jordan’s larger context, across her essays and poetry, is a politics of self-definition: language as a contested territory. She’s warning that the fight isn’t only over resources; it’s over the right to decide what deserves your attention, your grief, your joy, your work.