Negroland
A Memoir
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4.1 • 35 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic
Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”
Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. Negroland’s pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South.
It evolved into a world of exclusive sororities, fraternities, networks, and clubs—a world in which skin color and hair texture were relentlessly evaluated alongside scholarly and professional achievements, where the Talented Tenth positioned themselves as a third race between whites and “the masses of Negros,” and where the motto was “Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.”
Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions, while reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the falsehood of post-racial America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jefferson (On Michael Jackson), a former book and theater critic for the New York Times and Newsweek, writes about growing up in mid-20th-century Chicago as well as in "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty" in this eloquent and enlightening memoir. Jefferson describes how her peers thought of themselves as "the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians." Jefferson's father was a pediatrician at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital, and her mother was a social worker turned socialite. With her family's privilege came many perks: attendance at the private, progressive, mostly white University of Chicago Laboratory School; summer camps; drama performances; an impeccable wardrobe; and membership in national black civic organizations such as Jack and Jill of America and the Co-Ettes Club. Yet much was expected; for Jefferson's generation, she says, the motto was "Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment." In the late 1970s, though established in a successful journalism career, Jefferson contemplated suicide to escape the continued weight of these expectations. Black women, she writes, had been "denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity." Perceptive, specific, and powerful, Jefferson's work balances themes of race, class, entitlement, and privilege with her own social and cultural awakening.
Customer Reviews
What a wonderful adventure that was.
I grew up on the periphery of the times, place and class of Ms. Jefferson, but we shared similar social mores. It was kind of peculiar to see them in print, as there are very few black experiences I am aware of that were so revealing about that aspect of our community. It is even more rare for me to see a black woman writer give such beautiful word to both the rose and the thorns of life, hers or anyone elses.
It is with the rarely blinking eye of a critic, that she looks at her life and community. I feel at once proud and a bit ashamed because there is so much here that explains my family and community, that I so easily identify with someone we’d refer to not as bourgeois, but the less palpable ‘sididitty’, a term used to unseat those who we considered to look down on us, when in truth we were looking up to them.
Over the years, well meaning friends of all races have pushed books and stories in my face to show that they understand my particular plight of being black and from Chicago’s South Side, finally I have something to push back at them, that better explains my ‘plight' to them. That ‘third race’ is one that is finally coming to the fore in America. Ms. Jefferson gives us a good history of the ‘not-poor’ black person, who didn’t come by their class as matter of crime or athletic endeavor.
Whether you’re just curious or looking to serioulsy round out your idea of who black people are, I would reccommend that you read this book. Or if your just looking for a good read, this book fills the bill. Her use of language is top notch, filled with the love of great writing. Great writing. And a wonderful adventure.