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Pantheon
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
256 pages
ISBN: 0307378454
EAN: 9780307378453
Kindle: B00R04MDIQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative,
celebratory and elegiac—here is a deeply felt meditation on
race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the
author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black
elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the
black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against
both.
Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her
father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at
the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was
a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life
among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy,
the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the
nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants
of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where
residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege
and plenty.”
Reckoning with the strictures
and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the
civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of
postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists
and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral
contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair
and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the
grace of perseverance.
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