It 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. Negroland’s pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Jefferson 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.” An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic.ENVSC 290: Climate Change/Climate Modeling, Spring 2015.

Murder on the Kibbutz by Batya Gur **** (of 4) The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret **** (of 4) Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. Negroland: A Memoir a book by Margo Jefferson 25,243,668.80 raised for local bookstores Negroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson (Author) FORMAT Paperback 16.95 15.76 MP3 CD 29.95 Compact Disc 34. Despite claims to the contrary that her intentions were otherwise, Jefferson’s book is agonizingly tedious, monotonous in its inability to escape the premise that race pollutes everything in America. And yet no amount of education, intellect, acumen, or accomplishment can erase a skin color that immediately draws suppositions, most of them discounting, some of them denigrating, from white Americans. Always, because whites are watching and evaluating, and as her parents instructed her, she must be a model for her race. Jefferson is buffeted on one side by the burden of having to be forever superior to low blacks, black blacks. What emerges, beyond a lot of references to literature I haven’t read, and cultural icons of the 1950s and 1960s that I barely recall, is the grinding, irrepressible tank tread of American racism.

Margo Jefferson is nearing the end of a successful career as an English professor and brings all of her skill as a cultural analyst and textual critic to bear on her life as an elite African American.

Negroland book summary