Pride, Prejudice, and the Provisions of Privilege: Margo Jefferson on Race, Depression, and ...
Pride, Prejudice, and the Provisions of Privilege: Margo Jefferson on Race, Depression, and How We Define Ourselves
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/14/margo-jefferson-negroland-privilege/
"“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their revelatory conversation on power and privilege. “If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.” The many modes of telling and the many types of trouble are what trailblazing journalist, longtime New York Times theater critic, and Pulitzer winner Margo Jefferson (b. October 17, 1947) explores in Negroland: A Memoir (public library) — a masterwork of both form and substance.
Jefferson transforms her experience of growing up in an affluent black family into a lens on the broader perplexities of privilege and its provisional nature. Her piercing cultural insight unfolds in uncommonly beautiful writing, both honoring the essence of the memoir form — a vehicle for reaching the universal from the outpost of the personal — and defying its conventions through enlivening narrative experimentation.
Jefferson, who came of age in an era when the biological fallacies of racial difference still ran rampant, writes:
"I was taught to avoid showing off. I was taught to distinguish myself through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off. But isn’t all memoir a form of showing off?"
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A good read that should lead to even more reading.