Fatherhood Quote by June Jordan

The line lands like a legal brief written with a poet's fury: June Jordan uses the chilly mechanics of debt collection to expose what the state chooses to value. "Garnish", "freeze", "seize" are blunt verbs from the world of contracts and creditors, the vocabulary of consequences. By stacking them, she makes absence visible: if the courts can move swiftly to protect property, their paralysis around child support isn't an accident; it's a policy decision dressed up as inevitability.

Jordan's punch comes in the last clause, where the comparison is deliberately ugly. A kid is not a car or a couch or a boat. The list is domestic and middle-class, the stuff of comfort and status, and that's the point: these objects are treated as legible assets with enforceable claims, while children are treated as private burdens, especially when the caretaker is a mother. The subtext is gendered and racialized without being announced: "in our society" signals a system that reliably mobilizes coercion to safeguard capital, then suddenly discovers limits when the work is caregiving, when the beneficiaries are dependents, when responsibility is paternal.

Context matters: Jordan was writing across the late 20th century's intersecting fights over welfare, family law, and Black feminist politics, where "family values" rhetoric often masked a refusal to fund or enforce actual material support. Her irony is surgical. She doesn't sentimentalize children; she indicts a society that can price a sofa, repo a boat, and still treat a child's survival as unenforceable.