Recent UW grad Jordan Gaines is a freelance journalist who will contribute and report on a wide variety of issues for Madison365. She brings plenty of journalistic experience to Madison365; she served an internship at The Capital Times and founded a revival of the campus publication The Black Voice last year, for which she earned a Special Projects Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Rank your top five MCs. I don’t really rank artists, but if I had to say the five MCs I currently have on rotation are as follows in no particular order: Chance the Rapper, NoName, J. Cole, Remy Ma, and Cardi B (I love Cardi for who she is more than for her music).
Which motivates you more: doubters or supporters? Supporters. My village is my everything and without them there would be no me.
Why do you live in Madison? Like many students who come here from cities marked with trauma, I find home in Madison in the people I’ve met and the person I became here. I don’t consider the city itself home, though, and nothing will replace Milwaukee for me.
What three leaders in Madison under 50 have impressed you the most?
- Sabrina Madison, hands down. I love everything about the work she does and I am crazy about the Conversation Mixtape and the focus on Black love. To me she truly is a person who will keep you accountable and that’s what our communities need.
- Zhalarina Sanders. This is an amazing young womyn whom I’ve had the pleasure of being in community with. She is passionate about everything and everybody she loves, from her music to her ministry to activism. She is also another person who will keep you accountable. I think that’s one of the most important qualities a leader can have.
- And of course Karla Foster. You don’t always get to see someone you look up to grow from start to finish, but I’ve watched Karla climb from the basement of Bascom Hall to the top resource for Black students on UW-Madison’s campus and she lifted everyone along as she did it.
What’s the biggest stumbling block in Madison to turning the corner on our racial disparities? I find that for this to be a somewhat small place with a fairly small Black population there is still a lot of disconnect among many organizations and groups that are working towards the same goals. For the short time I lived in Chicago I found the organizations there were collaborating and communicating much more despite the size of the city and population. I don’t think this will necessary “turn the corner” on racial disparities, because at the end of the day the oppressed cannot be blamed for their oppression and the ball for truly ending racial disparities is in the court of those who created and benefit from them. Still, I believe stronger collaborative communal efforts can create more effective safe spaces for folks affected by racial disparities and yield a more fortified front in fighting those disparities.
What are your top three priorities at this point in your life?
- Taking the things that I rendered as side hustles or silly dreams and making them my primary reality. I actually want to be all the things I once said I want to be when I grow up.
- Growing stronger in my faith and centering God in my life.
- Building my family and not being afraid to recognize that the pursuit and labor of love can be just as imperative to life as the pursuit of professional or academic goals, I’m kind of paraphrasing bell hooks on this idea.
Why did you decide to join a sorority? I found that many of the spaces I found the most refuge in were either created or led by womyn who were Deltas and many others were created and led by womyn whom I’d have the pleasure of becoming a Delta with. But even greater than my choice for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. specifically is the fact that spaces specifically for Black womyn existed. The intersections of my Blackness and my womynhood rarely get to co-exist in a space and be equally acknowledged and catered to, that fact that these organizations have been creating these spaces for over a century just gives me chills to think about.
Erykah Badu or Lauryn Hill? Erykah Badu
What was it like growing up with a Pastor as a father? I learned a very valuable lesson in putting your faith completely in God and not in man, even if those men are of God and even if they are your father.
You recently graduated from UW Madison. What three tips would you give them to help with race relations on campus?
- Find your people: having a strong village is crucial to surviving and managing your mental, emotional, spiritual, etc health. Join a church, join a student organization, join an initiative under a diversity office on campus; find some place where you can meet like-minded people so you feel less alone and more capable of completing the journey.
- Be honest with yourself: College really is not for everyone, and I don’t say that to say it’s only for the strongest or the smartest. I say that because I saw many who were too strong or too smart to be invalidated by the industry of education. Some folks forgot what they were capable of and underestimated their own power, so if your major, or your career choice, or your UW-Madison, or higher education as whole isn’t for you that’s okay.
- Have fun: Over the years I have seen a heightened urgency to activate against the campus racial climate and hit the ground to do their part to solve the problem. While this has been amazing to watch and be a part of I do find it to be exhausting. Students of color are having to work twice as hard as their white counterparts while also doing the extra work of creating and maintaining their own safe spaces. It’s important to also find joy, joy that isn’t centered around or in response to your existence as an outlier on campus.
What will you miss most about the Obamas being out of the White House? I didn’t have any really strong attachment to President Barack Obama and his family, but I will say that there were certain mannerisms and behaviors Barack and Michelle have, like a facial expression your mama has given umpteen times and you know all too well what it means. They would speak a language that usually only survived in my home or my neighborhood, but to see that language authentically live outside of those places in a small way normalized Blackness for me.
You could do anything in the world. Why become a journalist? I became a journalist because I intend to do all the “anythings in the world” I am capable of doing as it contributes to the holistic liberation of Black folks. For me, journalism allows me to address the problems I do know through telling people’s story and truth, but it also allows me to learn about the problems I don’t know by getting to listen to so many stories and truths.
