![]() ![]() Throughout the book, there is this sense of ghost-like longing, a distant ache to reconcile a childhood without having to bare one’s soul in the process. This oddly tenuous privilege, hard-won and yet still as easily diminished or destroyed as any other black experience, is clearly something Jefferson has grappled with - in turns proud and ashamed. ![]() At a time when black people are disrupting presidential campaign speeches nationwide in an effort to be recognized as human beings, “Negroland,” the new memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, offers poignant insight into what it means to have been raised in the sheltered Kingdom of Negroes that Jefferson refers to as “the Third Race” - upper-middle-class African Americans who, among a long list of other things, “refused to be held back by the lower element.” Particularly as that “lower element” - then and now - likely translates to the black people who are getting killed in staggering numbers by police violence, who earn on average far less than their white counterparts, who live unveiled and unprotected in the face of rampant systemic racism. ![]()
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