Willie Jordan Marginalization

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“Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” is an essay written by poet, activist, and professor of English, Women’s Studies, and African-American Studies at SUNY at Stony Brook and U.C. Berkeley, June Jordan. Jordan wrote this essay about an experience she had while teaching at SUNY, beginning with the course “In Search of the Invisible Black Woman.” While teaching this course, Jordan assigned Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as class reading. When she facilitated a class discussion on the reading, Jordan was shocked when her majority Black class reacted strongly and negatively to seeing, written out, the language with which the characters of the novel spoke - Black English. Jordan postured that the students’ initial negative reaction was “probably akin to the shock of seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time. Most of the students had never before seen a written facsimile of the way they talk[ed.]” (Jordan, 365) This discussion resulted in the class …show more content…

This marginalization is still prevalent today, as Black English is still overwhelmingly stigmatized and discredited in nearly all academic settings, particularly within American culture. Jordan’s demonstration that Black English is not given respect or afforded validity in academic and social settings still rings true today. Black English-speaking students see little to no representation of their language in the classroom, and are often actively discouraged from speaking the language of their community and of their upbringing. This suppression and delegitimization of a valid method of communication represents colonialist and white supremacist notions of language, social homogeneity, and latent institutional racism, and has negative, even dire, consequences for the students

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