We are all refugees.

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 so-called illegal aliens. Rather than "child care," you will hear "border patrol." Rather than "rehabilitate," you will hear "three strikes and you're out."

And in the absence of a civilizing humane leadership, and in the presence of a leader who contemplates taxation of food stamps, and in the presence of a leader who can betray his promise to Haitian refugees and who can sleep very well in verified co-existence with genocide in Bosnia and who can desecrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by daring to misrepresent Dr. King's analysis which, contrary to Clinton's galling and appalling assertions, in fact called for billions of dollars to be invested in human salvation undertakings inside South Central L.A. and inside every other city of these United States--in the quandary of such terrible leadership absence and such awful leadership presence, is it any wonder that a ten-year-old boy recently assisted his fourteen-year-old buddy in the killing of a woman for $80 and the hell of it?

In a country where Dan Quayle is reportedly making a comeback no doubt related to the victory of Richard Nixon's burial of Tricky Dick's real life, is it any wonder that the ten-year-old willing accomplice to murder could say something so stupid as: "It wasn't supposed to be like that. It was a game, right?"

And then there is the forgotten issue of the woman, Elizabeth Alvarez, who was the mother of three children and married and now she's dead and The New York Times devoted a whole page-and-a-half to her killers: What "the boys" said or didn't say, and what various experts think or do not think about "the boys" and all you ever know about Elizabeth Alvarez is that she was pregnant, she was married, and she's dead.

But how old was she? How come she didn't kill anybody? Did she ever dream or do anything besides get married and have children? Why does The New York Times refer to her simply as "a mother of three" Was she never anybody's sister/ friend/teacher/confidante/employee/partner or somebody's dearest person in the whole wide world?

I want to know how come Elizabeth Alvarez never ever killed anybody. I want to know how come boys and men commit 87 per cent of all violent crimes. And no, I don't think Elizabeth Alvarez is dead because the two killer boys were raised by "women on welfare." But I do think that the fact that the father of one boy abandoned him and his fourteen-year-old mother, and I do think that the fact that the father of the second boy regularly beat up that boy's mother--I do think that these misogynist facts of paternal irresponsibility and violence led to their fatal choice of "a mother of three" as victim.

As I think about the stories of women--from my students all the way back to my maternal grandmother--again and again I am struck by qualities of hesitation and restraint. Some might interpret these characteristics as facets of mere modesty. But I would disagree. Modesty is something calculated or fake. And it leads nowhere except to the lowering of your eyes. But hesitation and restraint make tenderness and generosity and altruistic interaction possible and even likely.

Hesitation and restraint quiver quietly alive someplace opposite to violence and domination. And I wonder about that apparently unequal equation.

Is that the problem, worldwide?

Is the female of the species some kind of noble/virtuous set-up for her male counterpart?

How come Elizabeth Alvarez never killed anybody?

If she ever imagined boy-killers under development and wanted to evade a violent death, where could she go? Where could she find sanctuary?

As a woman, married or not, and pregnant or not, and mother of one/two/three, or none--where could she find political or economic asylum that would mean safety and respect and equal access to freedom and to the power to guarantee her own safety and her own equal access to freedom?

Instead of Mandela's New World, our politicians and their media flunkies busily and viciously strive to resurrect an Old World in which there will be no safety, no asylum, for anybody but themselves. These men, direct descendants of other men who came to America never asking anybody's permission to arrive or to invade or to conquer or to exterminate or to enslave or to betray or to exploit and discriminate against those who preceded them and those who, willingly or not, came after them--these men now contrive a so-called immigration crisis and they invent and then promulgate pathological-idiot terms like "illegal aliens."

But, as a matter of fact, the planet is not entirely white, or male. And the United States is no longer mostly white, and it will never be more than 50 per cent male. And today's wannabe gatekeepers are having themselves a holy-cow fit about this in-your-face situation of their inevitable decline. And so they castigate every one of the varieties of colored peoples seeking entry into our beloved American experiment of a multi-racial/multi-ethnic/multicultural body politic. And, as usual, the punishing burden of this hateful effort to exclude and to reject people clamoring for refuge and relief, the brunt of this hatred falls upon the weak: 80 per cent of the 100 million displaced people on the planet are women and children: 80 per cent! Overwhelmingly, the face of displaced humanity is a female face. Overwhelmingly, her female predicament of multifaceted oppression remains not recognized as a political predicament. And, so, overwhelmingly, most refugees do not qualify for political asylum.

But what if we women everywhere arose to demand political asylum from the personal and the institutional violence and domination that scar our existence everywhere? What if we demanded political asylum for ourselves--on the job, on the block where we live, in the bedrooms where we want to find and make love?

What if we declared ourselves perpetual refugees in solidarity with all refugees needing safe human harbor from violence and domination and injustice and inequality?

Could we arise with characteristic hesitation and restraint and nevertheless be seen, be heard, be strong enough to change our homes, change our streets, change our immigration policies, change our total national states into political and economic asylum for ourselves: the majority of human life?

In this American space disfigured by traditions of hatred and selfishness, we are all alien and we are, none of us, legitimate.

We are all refugees horribly displaced from a benign and welcoming community.

And the question is: Can we soon enough create the asylum our lives will certainly wither without?

Well, I behold the miracle of Mandela. And I behold the equally improbable miracle of domestic and international women's groups creating power out of sorrow and away from pain. I look at the Women's Foundation, and the National Black Women's Health Project, and the National Asian Women's Health Organization, and the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League finding out the facts, fighting for our dignified, fearless, and happily consequential female freedom, and to me the answer is easy, it's obvious. We're doing it!

June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies and Women's Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. She presented this piece at the Women's Foundation Benefit in San Francisco on the evening of May 18.