We are all refugees.

• Author: Jordan, June
• Position: Just Inside The Door - Column

This is a moment of enormous and demanding contradiction. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has become the president of the country that held him in prison for more than twenty-seven years. In South Africa, the new Bill of Rights prohibits discrimination against anyone on the basis of race or gender or class or age or sexual orientation. In South Africa, where 5 per cent of the population controls 88 per cent of the national wealth, President Mandela has appointed a cabinet committed to a five-year plan carrying forward three key proposals: the construction of one million new homes, a vast public-sector employment program, and universal, free, compulsory education.

In South Africa, where for more than 350 years white racist ideology has enjoyed enforcement by tyrannies of the law and the whip and the bullet, the first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, has pledged himself to nonracial principles of justice and equal citizen entitlements for all.

Meanwhile, in these United States where common nouns such as democracy and liberty have long known bumpersticker popularity, the notion of a black man or a woman becoming the President remains a joke/a dopey idea/a theoretical construct of small or no plausibility.

In these United States it is difficult to find executive respect for any principle whatsoever except the principle of leadership by following the polls, and that other, most lamentable principle of allocating the least to those in greatest desperation.

Rather than living in a sovereign state in which someone wrongfully imprisoned may nevertheless rise above injustice and one day occupy the highest office, we suffer from budget policies that crush public education up against our ill-considered rush to criminalize and incarcerate and stigmatize and impoverish and deport those men, women, and children among us who possess the most meager array of options.

Rather than the "new world" invoked by President Mandela, our politicians and their media flunkies in these United States spout disinformation designed to bring about an Old World faithful to a Eurocentric, patriarchal history that drags a pretty poor track record into view.

And so you will not hear White House or Sacramento declarations of a five-year plan to meet basic human requirements for housing and employment and knowledge. Instead you will hear White House and Sacramento presentations of a racist slant on public issues of crime, drugs, and so-called welfare, and...