Politics & Power Quote by June Jordan

June Jordan doesn’t ask politely for permission; she indicts. “Language is political” lands like a gavel because she’s naming what classrooms and style guides try to hide: that “proper” English is not neutral technique but enforced allegiance. The sentence barrels forward on breath and rhythm - “you and me, my Brother and Sister” - pulling the reader into a collective body before the institutions can separate, remediate, or rank it. That intimacy is strategy. If power works by isolating students into individual “deficits,” Jordan works by building a we.

The violence in her verbs is the point. “Choke our natural self” is bodily, intimate harm; it frames assimilation as self-strangulation, not self-improvement. Then she stacks descriptors - “weird, lying, barbarous, unreal” - to flip the colonial script. Historically, Black speech and other nonstandard Englishes were labeled “broken” or “primitive.” Jordan throws those accusations back at “white speech,” exposing how the so-called standard often demands emotional falseness, respectability theater, and obedience disguised as clarity.

“Holy law” is a devastating phrase because it captures the secular religion of schooling: grammar as morality, pronunciation as virtue, correction as salvation. The subtext is not that students shouldn’t learn multiple registers; it’s that schools too often teach code-switching as surrender, with whiteness as the only credible voice. Jordan’s intent is liberation through linguistic legitimacy: to make readers feel, in their throats, that the “rules” were never just rules - they were a political border patrol.