{"product_id":"negroland-isbn-9780307473431","title":"Negroland","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL 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\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJefferson 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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eMargo 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIt 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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eJefferson 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.\u003cb\u003eWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award •\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brave. . . . Revelatory. . . . Recall[s] a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race . . . James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Powerful. . . . Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being party of America’s black elite.” —Roxane Gay, \u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required reading across the country.”\u003ci\u003e —Vanity Fair \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “Intricate and moving. . . . Powerful.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Enlightening. . . . Poetic and bracing.” \u003ci\u003e—The Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] masterpiece. . . . A phenomenal study-cum-memoir about the black bourgeoisie.” —Hilton Als, author of\u003ci\u003e White Girls\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A veritable library of African-American letters and a sumptious compendium of elegant style. . . . [Jefferson] paints her rich inner and outer landscape with deft, impressionistic strokes.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Provocative and insightful. . . . Melancholic and hopeful, raw and disarming. . . . A moving memoir that is an act of courage in its vulnerability.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of\u003ci\u003e The Warmth of Other Suns\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Poignant. . . . Harrowing. . . . In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Jefferson combines memoir with cultural critique in a series of unsparing vignettes.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Provocative and extraordinary. . . . Haunting.” —\u003ci\u003eTime \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Lyrical. . . . Vibrant and damning. . . . Dares to throw a wrench—class—into our tortured debates about race.” —\u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Razor sharp, self-lacerating and singular.” —\u003ci\u003eMore\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A candid observer, Jefferson articulates the complicated and calculated performance of upper-class black life.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Brilliantly written. . . . Not reading this remarkable, indeed unique book, would be an immense mistake. . . . One of the great books published this year.” —\u003ci\u003eBuffalo News\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Truly indispensable.” —\u003ci\u003eFlavorwire\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A nuanced meditation from a life lived in the upper echelons of Chicago’s black bourgeoisie, beginning before the civil-rights era and trailing off in our still-conflicted present.” —\u003ci\u003eVulture\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Beautiful. . . . Artfully self-aware. . . . Jefferson succeeds at something remarkable: she tells her story while at the same time not only evocatively capturing her era but situating her experiences into a centuries-long cultural tradition.” —\u003ci\u003eBookslut \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Shines a spotlight on a fascinating slice of the American experience of which many people are barely aware.” —\u003ci\u003eTampa Bay Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Filled with incisive commentary and unexpected observations, all of it delivered with a sly wit and in crystalline prose.” —\u003ci\u003ePopMatters\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Marvelous, complex, stimulating and thought-provoking.” —Geoff Dyer, author of \u003ci\u003eWhite Sands\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A beautiful scorcher of a book, essential reading.” —Patricia Hampl, author of\u003ci\u003e The Florist’s Daughter\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Elegantly pithy and violent. In the fissures between and among items, she revolts. Her words are ascetic. She doesn’t want me to envy her life, the fullness of which is only hinted at. She wants me to leave her alone to live within this sentence of her mother’s: ‘Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro.’” —David Shields, author of \u003ci\u003eSalinger\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A great book, destined to be read for a century.” —Edmund White, author of \u003ci\u003eA Boy’s Own Life\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Reads with the blast force of a prose poem.” —\u003ci\u003eBookPage\u003c\/i\u003eThe winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a book and arts critic for \u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, \u003ci\u003eVogue\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew York\u003c\/i\u003e magazine, and \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eGuernica\u003c\/i\u003e. Her memoir, \u003ci\u003eNegroland\u003c\/i\u003e, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of \u003ci\u003eOn Michael Jackson\u003c\/i\u003e and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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 arise to challenge its primacy.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I call it Negroland because “Negro” dominated our history for so long; because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long; because they were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or, as we now say, how race was constructed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor nearly two hundred years we in Negroland have called ourselves all manner of things. Like\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     the colored aristocracy\u003cbr\u003e     the colored elite\u003cbr\u003e     the colored 400\u003cbr\u003e     the 400\u003cbr\u003e     the blue vein society\u003cbr\u003e     the big families, the old families, the old settlers, the pioneers\u003cbr\u003e     Negro society, black society\u003cbr\u003e     the Negro, the black, the African-American upper class or elite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public. (Even now I shy away from the word “failings.”) Even the least of them would be turned against the race. Most white people made no room for the doctrine of “human, all too human”: our imperfections were sub- or provisionally human.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we’re prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite. But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A brief vita of the author.\u003cbr\u003e      Margo Jefferson:\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e     Ancestors: \u003c\/i\u003e(In chronological order): slaves and slaveholders in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; farmers, musi­cians, butlers, construction crew supervisors, teachers, beauticians and maids, seamstresses and dressmakers, engineers, policewomen, real estate businesswomen, lawyers, judges, doctors and social workers\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e     Father’s fraternity: \u003c\/i\u003eKappa Alpha Psi\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e     Mother’s (and sister’s) sorority: \u003c\/i\u003eDelta Sigma Theta\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e     Parents’ national clubs: \u003c\/i\u003ethe Boulé (father); the Northeast­erners (mother)\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e    Sister’s and my national clubs: \u003c\/i\u003eJack and Jill; the Co-Ettes\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Local clubs, schools, and camps will be named as we go along. Skin color and hair will be described, evaluated too, along with other racialized physical traits. Questions inevita­bly will arise. Among them: How does one—how do you, how do I—parse class, race, family, and temperament? How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Here are some of this group’s founding categories, the opposi­tions and distinctions they came to live by.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     Northerner \/ Southerner\u003cbr\u003e     house slave \/ field hand\u003cbr\u003e     free black \/ slave black\u003cbr\u003e     free black \/ free mulatto\u003cbr\u003e     skilled worker \/ unskilled worker (free or slave)\u003cbr\u003e     owns property \/ owns none\u003cbr\u003e     reads and writes fluently \/ reads a little but does not write \/ reads and writes a little \/ neither reads nor writes\u003cbr\u003e     descends from African and Indian royalty \/ descends from African obscurities \/ descends from upper-class whites \/ descends from lower-class whites \/ descends from no whites at all\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e White Americans have always known how to develop aris­tocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the \u003ci\u003eMayflower \u003c\/i\u003eand become founding fathers. German laborers emigrate to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings. Women of equally modest origins marry these men or their rivals or their betters and become social arbiters.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e We did the same. “Colored society” was originally a mélange of\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     men and women who were given favorable treatment, money, property, and even freedom by well-born Cauca­sian owners, employers, and parents;\u003cbr\u003e     men and women who bought their freedom with hard cash and hard labor;\u003cbr\u003e     men, women, and children bought and freed by slavery-hating whites or Negro friends and relatives;\u003cbr\u003e     men and women descended from free Negroes, hence born free.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e They learned their letters and their manners; they learned skilled trades (barber, caterer, baker, jeweler, machinist, tailor, dressmaker); they were the best-trained servants in the bet­ter white homes and hotels; they bought real estate; published newspapers; established schools and churches; formed clubs and mutual aid societies; took care to marry among themselves. Some arrived from Haiti alongside whites fleeing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black revolution: their ranks included free mulat­toes and slaves who, after some pretense of loyalty, found it easy to desert their former masters and go into the business of upward mobility. From New Orleans to New York, men and women of mixed blood insistently established their primacy.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305106526437,"sku":"NP9780307473431","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307473431.jpg?v=1767733607","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/negroland-isbn-9780307473431","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}