After analyzing several female poets in the anthology such as Andre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Moore Dunbar- Nelson, and Angeline Weld Grimke, I am amazed by the artistry within these fine women. Once I began reading June Jordan’s Poem About My Rights, I was captivated by the way she conveyed her pain on these pages. This was made for every black woman on this planet. There is a line for every woman of color that has suffered and feels disrespected, invisible, and meaningless. Jordan was born in New York City and attended Barnard College and the University of Chicago. After graduating, she went on to teach at several universities, including the University of California at Berkeley. Among her many awards and accolades, she received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

June utilizes repetition, laws, and historical events and correlates them to her rape. Initially analyzing the poem, it’s clear she is talking about physical rape, but as it precedes, she compares the rape to be of the mind, and the stealing of innocence, and the theft of the life she longs to live. The first stanza is simply about being alone. June wants the chance to walk alone and stargaze while she talks to God. However, every woman knows that walking alone at night is extremely dangerous. “Alone in the evening/ alone in the streets, alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong sec the wrong age the wrong skin.” The serenity that a nice walk by oneself brings is a privileged woman who doesn’t have. We are targets. She explains at the beginning of the stanza of all the precautions a woman must taker shall she decide to take that nightly walk alone, whether that be to her car, to her home, to her death. This brings me to the point of feminism.

Feminism is the advocacy for equal rights for women. However, a black woman and other minority women have a separate fight than a white woman. Though Jordan does state in the poem that all woman are targeted walking alone at night and that we were all “born the wrong gender,” she deciphers the inequalities we fight with white women and the ones we fight alone. Rape excludes no women based on race. We band together to advocate for laws to ensure our justice, and we defend our stories day in and day out explaining that it doesn’t matter if we dunked, or that we’re dating, or that we wore that skirt, or we led them on. It is not our fault that we are hunted. Jordan writes in the second stanza, “in France they say if the guy penetrates but does not ejaculate, then he did not rape me.” She goes on to different countries, laws, and policies that do not favor the female’s turmoil. Feminists around the world march, argue, defend, and stand up against everyone who sees us as secondary. But that does that include the problems that exclude white women and leave minority women to fend for themselves.

Toward the end of the poem, Jordan excludes white women and emphasizes the problems of her herself as a black woman. This is one of the most potent lines in the verse: “I am the history of rape, I am the history of the rejection of who I am, I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself.” Early she talks about how her parents wanted to correct her black features to make them fit Eurocentric standards. In the third stanza, she talks about the wrongful deaths by police officers and the C.I.A.. Though white women are still discriminated against, they will only face prejudice because they are a woman. They will never experience the injustices of being a woman and a minority.

The ending of the poem is empowering. June affirms that she is not wrong in anything that she is. She explains that nothing about this poem gives consent to dismiss her as a black woman or a woman period. “I have been the meaning of rape; I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration…but let this be unmistakable this poem s not consent.” She does not allow the historical evidence, the law, the despicable behavior of others, to deter her from becoming everything she is meant to amount to. This poem truly moved me, and I am grateful for June Jordan’s creativity.