#and lately many people have been recounting their childhood experiences to share in solidarity

[kushamiqueen]

Uhhhh werent Zach and Cody minors

I am aware this might be bait. It's in reference to my post about how there was a Suite Life On Deck episode where Zach was made to sneeze multiple times.

I was just recounting a childhood memory (or a surprising lack-there-of).

This show aired while I was in elementary school, so them being teens didn't bother me at the time, no.

Like many other tween girls, I was a Cole Sprouse fan.

It's really not that deep. You are free to unfollow.

[blackkudos]

June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, and activist.

Early life

Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan, in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker for the USPS and her mother as a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, which she dedicated to her father. In this short memoir she explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child". In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present. In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to become a soldier". While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, her father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight.

After attending Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Throughout her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" by attending predominantly white schools, but was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book Civil Wars, writing: "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America."

Personal life

At Barnard College, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958 Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965.

Jordan self-identified as bisexual in her writing.

Career

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969) was a collection of poems for children. 27 more books followed in her lifetime, one (Some of Us Did Not Die, Collected and New Essays) was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan.

In her memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating, "I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there's a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story. This is a story, I think, with a happy outcome, you know". She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky Jordan stated: "The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now."

Jordan's teaching career began in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. Jordan then became the director of The Poetry Center and was an English professor at SUNY at Stony Brook from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley.

Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People", and at Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program Jordan said: "I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success". Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program, which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995, entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.

Contributions to Feminist Theory

"Report from the Bahamas"

In her 1982 classic personal essay "Report from the Bahamas", Jordan reflects on her travel experiences, various interactions, and encounters while in The Bahamas. Writing in narrative form, she boldly discusses both the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification on the basis of race, class, and gender identity. Although not widely recognized in its first appearance in 1982, this profound essay has gained much classroom status throughout the United States in Women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. Jordan reveals several issues as well as important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity.

Privilege

In essentially every one of Jordan's works, including her poems and essays, she repeatedly emphasizes the term or the idea of privilege when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. There should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed at an equal standpoint.

Concepts of race, class, and gender

"[In 'Report from the Bahamas'] Jordan describes the challenges of translating languages of gender, sexuality, and blackness across diasporic space, through the story of a brief vacation in the Bahamas]." Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression indicated by race, class, and gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes, "these factors of race and class and gender absolutely collapse...whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection. They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict, but as elements of connection they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.”'

As Jordan reflects on her interactions with a series of black Bahamian women, from the hotel maid "Olive" to the old women street sellers hawking trinkets, she writes, "I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell and I buy or I don't. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon. We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other. (41)

Interspersing reflections of her trip with scenes of herself as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her own expectations are constantly surprised: for instance, she recounts how an Irish woman graduate student with a Bobby Sands bumper sticker provides much needed assistance to a South African student suffering from domestic violence; the incident is at variance with Jordan's own history of being terrorized by Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets.

Jordan's concluding lines thus emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it on the basis of shared histories: "I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us...I must make the connection real between me and these strangers everywhere before those other clouds unify this ragged bunch of us, too late."

Common identity vs. individual identity

Jordan firmly acknowledges and explains that we as human beings possess two very contrasting identities. The first identity is the common identity, which is the one that has been imposed on us by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification. The second is the individual identity that we ourselves have chosen once we are given the chance and feel are ready to expose our true selves.

Death and legacy

Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65. Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book), which was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.

The June Jordan School for Equity, or JJSE (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by the founding group of students who, through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting, chose her over Philip Vera Cruz and Ella Baker. A conference room is also named after her in UC Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California.

Honors and awards

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. She also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.

She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).

In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.

Reception

Author Toni Morrison commented: "In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth... [Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept...I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." Poet Adrienne Rich noted: "whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart". Alice Walker stated: "Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet." Thulani Davis wrote: "In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.'"

Wikipedia

[shontaviajesq]

A Tale of Two Chicagos: What I Learned From Becoming and Surviving R. Kelly

America’s major cities each have their own vibe. The hustle and bustle that weaves between New York’s skyscrapers is legendary. Los Angeles is well-known for its sunny weather, beautiful people, and Hollywood sign towering over America’s most historic film industry. The Las Vegas Strip beckons tourists with its bright lights, drive-thru weddings officiated by Elvis, and empty promises of winning it big on a slot machine. Even if you have never visited these places, you know the city’s personality.

Chicago also has a vibe. As a former Midwesterner, Chicago is a place that I became familiar with over nearly a decade (especially #SummertimeChi). The people, food, festival season, sports teams and music scene (among many other things) make it a great city. Unfortunately, recent years have focused on they city’s perceived propensity for violence.

For me, what has always stood out—more than Michael Jordan or the former Sears Tower or that silver bean-looking thing—is how much people from Chicago LOVE Chicago. And I mean…LOVE Chicago. I don’t care who a person is, if they are from Chicago they will let you know within the first 3-5 seconds of your interaction with them. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard an interview with Common or Chance the Rapper where they don’t mention their city. The Chi is always on their minds.

Chicago Bears GIF from Chicago GIFs

The city has also been on my mind a lot lately. I, like more than 3 million other people on the planet, bought Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, when it came out. Almost immediately after the book’s release in November 2018, I began getting texts from others in my circle who literally could. not. put. the. book. down.

Despite the rave reviews, Becoming sat on my floor in its Amazon.com box for several months. I did not begin reading it until around the New Year. True to Chicago form, Mrs. Obama shouted out her city (and especially her neighborhood on the South side of Chicago) literally on page 1 and continued throughout the book to reference her beloved hometown.

via GIPHY

Around this same time, the Lifetime network was preparing to set a huge, raging dumpster fire in the internet’s front yard. On January 3, 2019, Lifetime released part one of Surviving R. Kelly, a SIX-PART documentary about the girls and women who survived harrowing, horrible, disgusting [I need like a million more words here] pedophilia, predatory behavior and abuse at the hands of R. Kelly, an R&B artist that many folks muted long before the documentary aired. The six part series is jarring, shocking and incomprehensible (the decisions made by people, not the documentary itself) at times.

R. Kelly is also from the South Side of Chicago, and the city serves almost as a featured character throughout the documentary. The documentary describes his childhood and high school days in Chicago, his common presence at a McDonald’s near the high school, and his local studio and home. Chicago is front and center from the first few minutes of part one, and it plays a major role throughout the full documentary, which aired in parts over the span of several days.

Interestingly, I was finishing the last few pages of Becoming at the same time that Surviving R. Kelly was being aired. I went back and forth about whether I should watch it, because I knew it would be tough to hear the stories—when I was in law school, Criminal Law was the class I hate most…I could barely stand to read the details of the cases describing various types of homicides and assaults. I knew the Surviving R. Kelly documentary was going to make my stomach churn. I ultimately tuned in several days after it originally aired, perhaps out of some feeling of shared solidarity with the many black women talking about its themes across my social media platforms.

As I read about Mrs. Obama’s life and experiences in Chicago, I was struck by the reverence with which she talked about Chicago and the South Side. It nurtured and supported her, and later, her soon-to-be famous husband. When I watched the Lifetime documentary, Chicago seemed literally to be a different place. It was a place that had knowingly protected and revered R. Kelly despite being well-informed of his dangerous and evil predilections. It was the evil and depraved Mr. Hyde to Mrs. Obama’s Dr. Jekyll.

I was fascinated by this contrast and have a couple of observations to share.

Now, look—before we get into this. I know people from Chicago LOVE Chicago. I also appreciate that, as much as people from Chicago LOVE Chicago, they HATE equally as much (if not more) when people who ain’t from Chicago have something to say about Chicago. If that is you…bear with me. And take your finger off the holster of your Twitter fingers. I come in peace.

I should say at the outset that it feels weird comparing Becoming with Surviving R. Kelly.

If the forever first lady is on one end of the spectrum as it relates to protecting and championing the cause of young girls, Robert Kelly is so far on the other end of the spectrum that he ain’t even on a spectrum. Even his own daughter has called him a monster.

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#RKelly’s daughter #Buku aka #JoannKelly speaks on #SurvivingRKelly (SWIPE)

A post shared by The Shade Room (@theshaderoom) on Jan 10, 2019 at 12:06pm PST

Michelle Obama, as an accomplished, 55 year old professional woman from the South Side of Chicago, is the physical embodiment of an American success story, no matter whether you agree with her political or ideological views. She grew up in a working class family, worked her butt off in public and magnet schools, went to college, and worked her way through several upwardly-mobile job opportunities. Her accomplishments are impressive and plentiful and she has positively impacted the lives of countless girls of all backgrounds.

On the other hand….

Robert Kelly, a 52 year old man also from the South Side of Chicago, grew up in a home where he was sexually abused from age 7 to age 14 or 15, barely made it through grade school, and is functionally illiterate. In some ways his story could have also been a success story (and probably is to his ride-or-die fans). There was a time when he was the golden goose of the music industry, despite his upbringing. He is, by the numbers, one of the best selling music artists in the United States. Rolling Stone has said that he is "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s.” But, as we have learned at varying points in history, he is, quite literally, a monster. Surviving R. Kelly, for many people, was the exclamation point on decades—quite literally generations—of stories about his predatory, pedophilic, abusive behaviors again (primarily black) women.

Despite the fact that these two people have nothing in common other than being members of the human race (and I’m not even sure he deserves to be considered human), two things stuck with me as I compared and contrasted Becoming and Surviving R. Kelly.

Because similar paths can starkly diverge, we must carefully sow principles of love & survival into our children.

Obama starts Becoming with a description of her formative years in her South Shore neighborhood at the end of the 1960s. Because she was a good student who worked very hard, Obama had the opportunity to attend the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School. Because the school was across town, she had a roughly 90 commute by bus to get there. She describes the experience in the video below. The part I’m talking about goes from about the 1:30 minute mark until the 3:00 minute mark.

This magnet high school exposed her to all kinds of new things—she met black kids from wealthy, professional families, which she had never seen before. As Obama articulates in the video, the school helped her "find a place where [she] could be smart and feel good about it.” Because every student there was striving for success, Obama was able to cultivate her own dreams of success. Because she was in this environment, she would spend each day of her 90 minute bus commute doing homework and preparing for the next day of school.

In part 1 of Surviving R. Kelly, the documentary recounts an eerily similar commute for Jerhonda Pace (then Jerhonda Johnson). In 2008, Pace also had a long city bus commute to her Chicago high school, where she was a 15-year old freshman. Pace was also an R. Kelly superfan. When Kelly was criminally prosecuted on child pornography charges, his trial was held in a downtown Chicago courtroom. When Pace found out, she skipped school and instead traveled 40 miles by train and bus to attend his trial—it wasn’t hard for her to do because she had to take the bus to school anyway, and her single-mom was working several jobs and oftentimes not at home.

Pace was a visible attendee at the trial—She was photographed alongside Kelly and was a mainstay during the entire trial.

The photo below is of her in 2008, at 15 years old, waiting outside the court house.

At 15 years old, Pace was even quoted by MTV after Kelly was acquitted, saying:

"They can't call him a pedophile anymore," Johnson said. "They can't say he likes little girls. They don't have proof of that. Because he's innocent now. He's free."

This is one place the Surviving R. Kelly documentary began to throw me for a loop. Pace describes how, after the trial, Kelly called her (he was 41/42 at the time and she was probably 15/16). He invited her to his home and took her virginity that same day. This led to a multi-year spiral of abuse.

Listening to Pace’s story and thinking about Obama’s experience starkly illustrated for me how similar paths can diverge.

Obama’s long commute led her to a supportive place where the people around her had a vested interest in her success. Because she felt this all around her, she was propelled in the direction of her dreams. Pace’s commute, on the other hand, led her to a place where the one person she believed in ravaged both her mind and body for two years. She has said the last straws for her were when he slapped, choked, and spit on her.

These two things lay bare how carefully we must sow love and survival principles into our children. They can and will find themselves having to make any number of decisions. How we guide them could lead to either heaven or hell. There are good and bad people in the world waiting to exert their influence, and we owe it to the children in our lives to expose them to the ways that their paths can diverge.

By saying this, I do not intend in anyway to blame Pace or her mother for the situation she found herself in. Her victimization is solely the fault of her abuser—her naïveté was exploited. <<Who among us has never found themselves in a place where they knew they had no business being?>> My point is merely that we can and should offer kids the tools and opportunities that help them both identify and avoid unsafe situations.

2. We must eradicate cultures of silence.

The second big thing that I couldn’t shake was the difference between the sibling and other familial relationships of Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, and Robert Kelly and his younger brother, Carey Kelly.

Obama speaks with love about her big brother and how she always wanted to be like him and do the things he did. She talks about them being “tight, in part thanks to an unwavering and somewhat inexplicable allegiance he seemed to feel for his baby sister right from the start.”

Obama idolized her brother and, once she was old enough, she followed him places and learned how to navigate her adolescence by watching him. And Craig understood this. He was, to quote Obama, “the portrait of brotherly vigilance and responsibility.”

The Robinson kids were also taught to avoid being dishonest and dishonorable. There’s a story in the book that I’ll leave to page 47 of Becoming to articulate:

I can’t say that I had the moral compass or mental fortitude of 8th grade Craig. As I read this story and Obama’s other characterizations of her brother, I thought about the power of having this kind of role model as a kid and how positively these images must have been for her.

Carey Kelly speaks similarly about looking up to his older brothers, including Robert, and wanting to do everything they did. As the youngest of four, Carey followed his brothers around and emulated them. In a particularly jarring scene in Surviving R. Kelly, Carey talks about being sexually abused by his oldest sister at age 6 and going to Robert to tell him about the abuse:

Carey recounted going to his older brother, Robert (aka R. Kelly), about the abuse when he was a child. “Robert, him being my big brother, I brought that to him and told him what happened to me,” he said. “And when I told him, he didn’t really respond to it like I felt he should. When I told him, he said, ‘No, that didn’t happen.’ And I said, ‘Yes it did.’ And Robert said, ‘No it didn’t.’ And I left it alone. I really didn’t want to take it to my mom, because my brother was the test. And if he believed me, maybe I could’ve taken it to an adult.”

Whew. I was in tears through several parts of the documentary, and this was one of them. It is just sad all around. R. Kelly has also spoken in the past about being sexually abused by an older female family member, though he has never confirmed (at least publicly, who that was). Carey has said he doesn’t know if he and his brother were abused by the same person because they have never discussed it. And he did not believe any of the adults in his life would believe him.

In digesting these two experiences at the same time, I saw the striking impact that secrets can—or cannot have—on families. Fostering a culture of communication in our households can protect children from a lifetime of damage (or, in the case of 8th grade Craig, from being prematurely confronted with situations that they are not prepared for).

Keeping dark secrets is deeply rooted in African-American communities—firmly established in a history of slavery, discrimination and oppression. Themes like passing as white, rapes by slave masters of women and the resulting mixed-race offspring, and sexual abuse of enslaved men and boys helped foster this culture of secrecy. These patterns of silence have been passed down through the generations.

Of course, cultures of silence are not specific only to African-American culture, but history has certainly provided us with some unique circumstances and challenges. While it will be difficult and messy work, we can and should break free from the vestiges surrounding our arrival to this land. This includes rejecting family secrets that place children, relationships and mental health at risk.

Ultimately, both Becoming and Surviving R. Kelly illustrated for me that no place can be defined as just one thing. Chicago, like every city, is multifaceted and shaped by its people and experiences. Places can be simultaneously nurturing and dangerous. Good and evil. Accessible and inaccessible.

It is not enough to believe that good things happen in some places and bad things happen in others, or that one side of the tracks leads to success while the other leads to despair. Paths can diverge. Cultural strongholds can throw a person’s trajectory into a tailspin. If society is to improve and progress, we cannot view it as a monolith.

It makes all the sense in the world that people from Chicago LOVE Chicago. If you’re still reading at this point, you must feel some kind of way about Chicago yourself. From Becoming to Surviving R. Kelly, Chicago is a mirror for many points on the cultural spectrum in every city. I suppose we all play a role in what we ultimately see when we look into that mirror.

——-

If you read Becoming and watched the documentary, what are your thoughts? Were there other common themes? Leave a comment below so that we can discuss those too.

via GIPHY