Love Quote by June Jordan

Jordan refuses to let "feminist" sit comfortably as a political accessory. She pairs it with "the fact that I am Black" to strip the word of lifestyle branding and return it to stakes: survival. The sentence pivots on an almost legalistic phrase, "undertake to", which turns identity into obligation. She is not describing a feeling; she is assigning herself a practice. That move matters because it frames feminism less as a set of opinions about gender and more as a daily discipline against a world that profits from your self-erasure.

The subtext is blunt: oppression works best when it recruits the oppressed to do the work internally. Racism and sexism do not merely exclude; they train you to doubt your own worth, to negotiate your presence, to mistake endurance for dignity. Jordan counters that with a radical, unsentimental definition of self-love. It is not self-esteem in the therapeutic sense. It is a political technology, something you do "as though my very life depends upon" it because, in her America, it often does.

Context sharpens the force. Jordan wrote out of Black feminist and queer-aligned movements where mainstream feminism routinely centered white women, and civil rights rhetoric often sidelined gender. By yoking Blackness and feminism, she refuses the demand to choose which part of herself is "the real issue". The line reads like a survival manual and a critique: any liberation project that doesn't require self-respect from its members is already conceding ground.