June Jordan’s Testimony: Framing the Educational Lives of Black Boys

• In Event: They “Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: Black Women’s Contributions to Black Education

Abstract

June Jordan is celebrated as a poet, teacher, essayist, and activist, yet her contributions remain understudied in the field of education. This paper engages Jordan as an educational leader and scholar of Black Studies to think about the ethical demands of researching and writing about Black boys in education.

Hampton Clanton, or as he is more affectionately referred to by Jordan as Hamp, was sixteen years old when he appeared in conversations for “Testimony,” June Jordan’s written documentary about the filming of The Cool World, a film which plots a group of Black boys in Harlem “who because they are outside of the ‘legitimate’ structure of power, construct their own,” through a gang (Jordan, 1981). Duke, the leader of the gang, and whose role Hampton played in the film, had a fantasy of owning a gun as a means of expressing his masculinity. When discussing Hampton or Duke, Shirley Clarke, the film’s white director, uses their names interchangeably as though the same history of enforced impotency emblematized by Duke’s character were embodied by Hampton in the flesh. In her profile of Hampton in “Testimony,” Jordan reveals that Hampton and the fictional character Duke indeed have an important connection; that is, the nature and frequency of their fantasies. And as June Jordan makes clear, fantasy was Hampton’s word for expressing the reasonable expectation of a school to cultivate his mind, not owning a gun. This stands as an important corrective.

In academic research and in public discourse, constructions of the Black male body as a “problem” have rendered Black boyhood unimaginable or otherwise underimagined in educational contexts (Brown, 2021; Carter, 2017; Dumas and Nelson, 2016; Givens and Nasir, 2016). Examining the nexus between literature, film, and academic research, this paper explores the persistence of antiblack tropes that continue to frame qualitative research on Black boys. Using Warren Miller’s 1959 novel The Cool World, Shirley Clarke’s 1963 film adaptation of the novel, and June Jordan’s 1981 book Civil Wars, I examine how antiblackness intrudes on literary and film depictions of Black boys and consider an approach to representing Black boyhood in academic research that foregrounds their humanity. Drawing upon the conceptual and methodological protocols of Black Studies, this paper asks: what constitutes an ethical approach to studying and writing about the educational lives of Black boys?

Both the American literary, cinematic, and social scientific imagination share a troubling history of representing the black male body in crisis—“as always already animalized, broken and brokered” (Bennett, 2019; Nogués, 2015; Wilderson, 2010). Using June Jordan’s essay “Testimony,” featured in Civil Wars, this paper recuperates Jordan’s cinematic techniques as a method to ethically represent the life worlds of Black boys in educational research and offers implications for future studies.

Author

• Christian J. Walkes, Harvard University