Quotes from Margo Jefferson

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

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.

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

I have cuts and bruises that do not map a course.

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.

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.

I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties.

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.

I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.

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.

I catch myself thinking that I'm not physically visible, that whoever I'm talking to is responding to my personality, not my person.

Nadinola Bleaching Cream: "Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?

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.

Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.

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.

Showing off was permitted, even encouraged, only if the result reflected well on your family, their friends, and your collective ancestors.

Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We

I crave the gift of recreational shallowness. The trick of knowing when to be cleverly trivial, lightweight; when to avoid emotional excess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When he's not lynching you, he's humiliating you, said the men at the dinner table. They

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.