Politics & Power Quote by June Jordan

In June Jordan's hands, "truth" is not a cozy ideal; it's a confrontation. Calling poetry a "political act" sounds like a provocation until you remember what Jordan spent her career doing: writing against the state-sanctioned fictions that flatten Black life, women’s lives, queer lives, immigrant lives into either silence or stereotype. The line works because it yokes two things American culture loves to keep separate: art as private expression and politics as public combat. Jordan refuses that division. If power operates by controlling whose reality counts, then the act of naming reality precisely becomes insurgent.

The subtext is impatience with the notion of "apolitical" art. Jordan implies that neutrality is itself a choice, usually one that protects the status quo. "Telling the truth" doesn’t mean issuing a slogan; it means refusing the euphemisms that make injustice feel natural: collateral damage, broken homes, urban blight. Poetry, in her framing, is a technology for accuracy. Its compression, its attention to sound and image, can make lies harder to hide behind. A poem doesn’t merely argue; it makes you inhabit a fact.

Context matters: Jordan wrote through civil rights and Black Power, Vietnam, second-wave feminism, AIDS, the Reagan era's punitive politics. She saw how language gets weaponized - by media, by schools, by government - and answered with a counter-language built for clarity and intimacy. The sentence is a manifesto disguised as a definition: art is not an escape hatch. It's a way of taking responsibility for what you can see, and insisting others see it too.