Margo Jefferson’s exploration of the African American experience runs the gamut from the personal to the historical“How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me?” These are questions that Margo Jefferson wrestles with in her excellent memoir,shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, questions deeply entwined with her experience growing up in what she calls Negroland. She thought-provokingly charts the history of the word Negro, or explaining: “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, or how race was constructed.” Jefferson fascinatingly explores how her personal experience intersected with politics,from the civil rights movement to feminism, as well as history before her birth.You gain seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man, or ” wrote Frederick Douglass in his autobiography,here quoted as Jefferson chronicles how escaped slaves such as Douglass, William Wells Brown and Ellen and William Craft first declared themselves in print and began publishing their stories in the 19th century. She goes on to trace “how slaves, or male and female,become social arbiters and leaders. Born in 1947 into Chicago’s black elite – the daughter of a paediatrician and a fashionable socialite she examines her own privilege: “Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege and plenty and that most whites would be happy to see them returned to indigence, deference, or subservience.” She cuts to the quick of how “privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied,withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com