This is an article from College English about how the poet-essayist-activist-teacher June Jordan navigated standardized vs. subjugated language practices in her CUNY class. It’s a super powerful essay and shows, among other things, how one’s personal experiences and positionally can be inseparable from one’s academic perspective. This essay was assigned to me last semester in my class on Speaking Truth to Power: Rhetoric of Domination and Resistance, and I also revisited it before the recent talk at the GC about June Jordan.