Politics & Power Quote by June Jordan

Truth, for June Jordan, isn’t a moral checkbox; it’s an aesthetic and bodily event. “To tell the truth is to become beautiful” flips the usual hierarchy where beauty is something granted by mirrors, markets, or gatekeepers. Jordan frames beauty as an outcome of refusal: refusing distortion, silence, euphemism, the small daily betrayals demanded by racism, sexism, and respectability. Beauty here isn’t prettiness; it’s coherence. It’s what happens when your inner account finally matches your public language.

The pivot to “love yourself, value yourself” is doing quiet but forceful work. Jordan isn’t selling self-help; she’s naming how domination operates: it trains people to distrust their perceptions, to edit their stories for safety, to treat their own needs as negotiable. Truth-telling becomes a method for re-occupying the self, like reclaiming stolen territory. The self is political not because it’s trendy to say so, but because power reliably targets self-definition first.

“And that’s political, in its most profound way” is Jordan’s final twist of the knife. Politics isn’t reduced to elections, legislation, or slogans; it’s the fight over whose reality counts. In Jordan’s era of insurgent Black feminist thought and coalition activism, testimony was infrastructure. Naming your life accurately was a way to produce solidarity, to build language that could hold the actual conditions people were surviving.

The subtext: if you can be made to lie about yourself, you can be managed. If you can tell the truth, you become harder to govern.