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A review by ridgewaygirl
Negroland by Margo Jefferson
4.0
Margo Jefferson's memoir of growing up affluent and African American is a fascinating and illuminating look at a world that is both similar and very different to my own. Jefferson's father was a respected pediatrician and she and her sister grew up in private schools and clubs, wearing expensive clothes, but constantly reminded of their otherness in a world (Chicago in the middle of the last century) that would allow a limited and select number of African Americans into their white, liberal enclaves, but with a certain amount of discomfort. Jefferson grew up with the idea of needing to respectable, to behave so perfectly as to overcome the ideas white people had of black people. Then, as a teenager and adult, Jefferson experiences the changes wrought by the sixties, from the Civil Rights Act to feminism as she forges a career as a journalist.
Negroland discusses the black experience and the effects of racism from a world where it was more subtle. The mothers who are overly formal with her mother, the homes where she isn't invited for playdates, the attention paid to skin tones and hair textures and the constant need to prove themselves worthy of living in a white world by being better by orders of magnitude than her peers. Jefferson has the same experiences every other girl has; self-consciousness about wearing glasses, crushes on cute boys, having a best friend. She writes with great honesty about her failings and the dreams she had.
Jefferson writes with an admirable clarity and complexity about the world she grew up in and about her adult life. That this book was so easy to read in no way dilutes the story she tells.
Negroland discusses the black experience and the effects of racism from a world where it was more subtle. The mothers who are overly formal with her mother, the homes where she isn't invited for playdates, the attention paid to skin tones and hair textures and the constant need to prove themselves worthy of living in a white world by being better by orders of magnitude than her peers. Jefferson has the same experiences every other girl has; self-consciousness about wearing glasses, crushes on cute boys, having a best friend. She writes with great honesty about her failings and the dreams she had.
Jefferson writes with an admirable clarity and complexity about the world she grew up in and about her adult life. That this book was so easy to read in no way dilutes the story she tells.