SOME OF US DID NOT DIE

A grab-bag of essays and verse on politics, literature, and travel.

Jordan (African-American Studies/UC Berkeley; Technical Difficulties, 1992, etc.) harbors understandable rage at the stupidities and inequities of life in a fundamentally racist society in a time when things, by all rights, should have gotten better. Instead, she writes, African-Americans “have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People” whose opinions and indeed whose reality scarcely come into account in matters such as elections and education. Some of the stronger pieces here, many previously published in her column in The Progressive, address the vast complex of injustice that is contemporary American life. Others, better still, address educational and cultural issues such as Black English and the overall decline in standards in schools everywhere and for all: “We have silenced or eliminated minority children. We have pacified white children into barely competent imitations of their fear-ridden parents.” Still others are less pointed, including several pieces on what amount to literary enthusiasms; coupled with Jordan’s hortatory approach to politics, these give the collection the feel of a bookish pep rally at which the exclamation mark gets quite a workout: Let’s all read Walt Whitman! Let’s take it to the man! Down with ex-husbands! Many of the op-ed pieces, too, are ephemeral, so much so that readers in the not too distant future may need footnotes to find their way through them. Who, they may wonder, was O.J. Simpson, other than someone Jordan criticizes for not wanting to be seen as black, but instead as a raceless star? What was a Sandinista? And what on earth does “Sometimes I am the terrorist I must disarm” mean?

Judicious editing would have helped. Still, of some interest to activists, and especially to educational reformers.