Education Quote by June Jordan

To “educate myself incessantly” is June Jordan refusing the tidy idea that learning is a phase you graduate out of. The verb is doing covert political work: educate myself. Not be educated. Not be instructed. In Jordan’s orbit, self-education is agency, a way of wresting authority from institutions that have historically misnamed, erased, or disciplined people like her: Black, woman, queer, unabashedly radical. “Incessantly” is the tell. It’s not self-improvement as a hobby; it’s vigilance, the posture of someone living in a world that can turn hostile fast and then blame you for not understanding the rules.

The line also carries Jordan’s signature insistence that the “world around me” is not abstract. It’s neighborhoods, wars, classrooms, police, language. She wrote into the late 20th century’s churn of civil rights aftermath, feminist fracture, Vietnam, apartheid, U.S. empire, and the culture wars over whose stories count as knowledge. Against that backdrop, education becomes less about credentials than about survival and solidarity: staying awake to systems that benefit from your exhaustion.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet defiance. No ornate metaphor, no grand pronouncement - just a compact ethic. Jordan is smuggling a standard for citizenship into a personal vow: if you want to speak, love, organize, or even just live honestly, you owe the world attention. And attention, for her, is never neutral; it’s a practice with consequences.