Negroland Quotes

“So I won’t trap myself into quantifying which matters more, race, or gender, or class. Race, gender, and class are basic elements of one’s living. Basic as utensils and clothing; always in use; always needing repairs and updates. Basic as body and breath, justice and reason, passion and imagination. So the question isn’t “Which matters most?,” it’s “How does each matter?” Gender, race, class; class, race, gender—your three in one and one in three.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people have had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren’t looking. Keep a close watch.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“I have cuts and bruises that do not map a course.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“I call it Negroland because I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“And white women can reform nothing until and unless they are willing to relinquish their caste privilege, those codes of racial and social superiority they extol in their men and instill in their children.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“So I grew. And as I grew I learned that in the world beyond family and family friends, your mistakes—bad manners, poor taste, an excess of high spirits—could put you, your parents, and your people at risk.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation (not an untrue one,though not quite sufficient) is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements (institution’s, people’s), by so much dread of disapproval, that the discipline of solitude—severe solitude—has been required to give you the sense of an independent selfhood. The intensities of friendship suit you better. Friendship’s choreography is for multiple partners: for varied groups and surprisingly sustained duets.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“There was a girl, once upon a time and in your time. She embraced her life up to a point, then rejected it, and from that rejection have come all her difficulties.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“The human psyche is pathetic," I say–I declaim–to my psychopharmacologist.
"It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have."
And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best.
There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what?
So what?
Go on.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“I catch myself thinking that I’m not physically visible, that whoever I’m talking to is responding to my personality, not my person.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“- I’ve never been so sick of RACE in my life.

Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPS compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for so long.

- This is my dream. Eradicate them all. Then fix your hair, and put your hands in your muff as your heels go clip clip clip across the pavement.
- May I help you, ma’am?
- Thank your, sir, I’ve just murdered quite a few people and I need a taxi.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“Don’t laugh at the spinsters,…for often very tender, tragical romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns,” Alcott pleads.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Nadinola Bleaching Cream: “Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Showing off was permitted, even encouraged, only if the result reflected well on your family, their friends, and your collective ancestors.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Children always find ways to subvert while they’re busy complying. This child’s method of subversion? She would achieve success, but she would treat it like a concession she’d been forced to make. For unto whomsoever much is given, of her shall be much required. She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“I crave the gift of recreational shallowness. The trick of knowing when to be cleverly trivial, lightweight; when to avoid emotional excess.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“Lawrence Otis Graham is a sprightly gossip in the Clamorgan mode: he writes largely for white magazines and is considered something of an upstart by old-line blacks. His 1999 Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class is a cross-country social whirl of interviews and personal anecdotes. Graham chronicles our old ways, and makes sure to certify their current value with the status symbols of integration; “exclusive” and “prestigious” schools and neighborhoods; “impeccable,” even “inspiring” professional credentials; friendships”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“When he’s not lynching you, he’s humiliating you, said the men at the dinner table. They”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir