"We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived"
About this Quote
Jordan refuses the easy moral high ground of mocking white panic. The line opens with an almost diplomatic restraint, then snaps into indictment: if you built a country on violence and private property, your fear is not a misunderstanding, its a rational forecast. The phrasing "prospering white America" is surgical. Prosperity is not neutral here; it is the payoff of a racial order. "White" is not just demographic description but the naming of a power bloc that experiences itself as ordinary, even innocent, while benefiting from harm.
The second sentence does the real work. Jordan yokes "violence" and "private property" as twin foundations, collapsing the comforting civics-class distinction between state force and economic arrangement. Property is not merely a legal category; it is the story a nation tells to sanctify what it has taken and what it intends to keep. In that frame, dread becomes a form of confession. White America fears the "violated and the deprived" not because the poor are inherently threatening, but because deprivation and violation are evidence. They point back to the original thefts and ongoing policing that maintain the ledger.
Written from the vantage of a Black feminist poet in the late 20th-century U.S., the line reads like a response to backlash: the post-civil-rights era demand that the oppressed be patient, polite, grateful, nonthreatening. Jordan flips the script. She grants the fear its logic, then exposes what that logic requires: a society that expects retaliation because it knows, deep down, what it has done.
The second sentence does the real work. Jordan yokes "violence" and "private property" as twin foundations, collapsing the comforting civics-class distinction between state force and economic arrangement. Property is not merely a legal category; it is the story a nation tells to sanctify what it has taken and what it intends to keep. In that frame, dread becomes a form of confession. White America fears the "violated and the deprived" not because the poor are inherently threatening, but because deprivation and violation are evidence. They point back to the original thefts and ongoing policing that maintain the ledger.
Written from the vantage of a Black feminist poet in the late 20th-century U.S., the line reads like a response to backlash: the post-civil-rights era demand that the oppressed be patient, polite, grateful, nonthreatening. Jordan flips the script. She grants the fear its logic, then exposes what that logic requires: a society that expects retaliation because it knows, deep down, what it has done.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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