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Believers in this may not be very religious either, but they thrill to the divine democracy of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. They believe in the changing of the rules of the game. They seek to eliminate the percentage that goes to the nonproductive “house” and to make production a sure thing for all, open to all hands on equal terms, wherein wealth shall go to the producers in proportions Wxed by their individual contribution to production. In short, these have the vision of a society redeemed by the institutional application of the principles of Jesus, of Je¤erson, of Lincoln. Toward a Manifest New Destiny June Jordan february 1992 I have worked here, inside this country, and I have kept my eyes open, everlastingly. What I see today does not support a media-concocted controversy where my life or the lives of African Americans, Native Americans, Chicano Americans, Latin Americans, and Asian Americans amount to arguable fringe or freak components of some theoretical netherland. We have become the many peoples of this nation—nothing less than that. I do not accept that we, American peoples of color, signify anything optional or dubious or marginal or exotic or anything in any way less valuable, less necessary, less sacred, than white America. I do not perceive current issues of public education as issues of politically correct or incorrect curriculum. In a straight line back to James Baldwin who, twenty-eight years ago, begged us, black folks, to rescue ourselves by wrestling white people out of the madness of their megalomania and delusion, I see every root argument about public education turning upon deWnitions of sanity and insanity. Shall we submit to ceaseless lies, fantastic misinformation, and fantastic omissions? Shall we agree to the erasure of our beleaguered, heterogeneous truth? Shall we embrace traditions of insanity and lose ourselves and the whole real world? Or shall we defend and engage the multifoliate, overwhelming, and ultimately inescapable actual life that our myriad and disparate histories imply? In America, in a democracy, who shall the people know if not our many selves? What shall we aim to learn about the universe if not the entire, complicated truth of it, to the best of our always-limited abilities? What does public education in a democratic state require if not the rational enlightenment of as many of the people as possible? But how can you claim to enlighten a child and then tell him that the language of his mother is illegal? 356 part 18 envisioning a better world Most Americans are not even distant relatives of the nice guys who run the country . And so there’s not a lot of emotional blur to our perceptions. We’ve had to see them as clearly as the hunted need to watch the ones who hunt them down. Some of us sit in front of a young man, a member of the Creek nation, and we hear his voice break, and we feel his hands trembling, and we avoid staring at the tears that pour from his eyes as he tells us about the annihilation of his ancestors, about the bashing of babies’ heads against trees, about the alternate, nearly extinct worldview that his forefathers and foremothers embraced. Between convulsions of grief, he speaks about the loss of earlier, spirit relations between his hungering people and the foods of the Earth. Some of us must devise and improvise a million and one ways to convince young African American and Chicana women that white skin and yellow hair and blue eyes and thin thighs are not imperative attributes of beauty and loveliness. Some of us must reassure a student born and raised in Hong Kong that we do not ask her to speak aloud in order to ridicule her “English” but in order to beneWt from the wisdom of her intelligence. Some of us search for avenues or for the invention of avenues for African American boys to become men among men beyond and without surrendering to that racist o¤ering of a kill-or-be-killed destiny. And we move among the peoples of this nation on an eyeball basis. We do not deny the heterogeneity that surrounds our bodies and our minds. We do not suppress the variegated sounds of multiple languages spoken by so many truly di¤erent Americans all in one place, hoping for love. I am just one among an expanding hard-core number of American educators who believe...

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