the blueshift journal

Interview with Margo Jefferson

 

Can you give us a brief background of your career?  

 

Peripatetic though not disorderly. I got my Master’s from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1971. I knew I wanted to be a critic. My first published essay, on the race contradictions and conflicts of rock and roll, was in Harper’s. In ‘73, I went to Newsweek as a book reviewer, left five years later and started my double life as a teacher and writer. I wanted to do longer, more engaged essays, so I wrote for The Nation, The Village Voice, MS, The New York Times Sunday Book Review and Grand Street. I taught in the Journalism program at New York University. Then, around 1990 I went to Columbia, teaching in the Writing Program and the American Studies wing of the English Department. In 1993 I went to The New York Times as a book reviewer and then a theater critic and then a critic-at-large. I got a Pulitzer Prize in 1995; left the Times in 2005 – the same year I published On Michael Jackson.  I taught at The New School (Liberal Studies and Eugene Lang College). Now I teach in Columbia’s undergrad and graduate Writing Programs. My book Negroland: A Memoir comes out from Pantheon in September.

 

 

In your lifetime, you have been a journalist, a critic, an essayist, a teacher, and possibly more to come.  What has been your favorite so far?

 

I like to have more, not less time to work – I need dream space -- and I like to play around with form, more and more. And with criticism as inquiry and vulnerability. Accessibility to experience. Teaching stretches your brain, tames your selfishness quotient, shows you what you know and what you need to keep learning.

 

 

In your opinion, why are black arts important in the movement for black empowerment?  What role do they have?

 

To keep us human and textured; to give us pleasure and sustenance. How can you keep struggling without all that?

 

 

I want to reference an article you wrote in Guernica, "Scenes From a Life in Negroland."  What is the Third Race?  

 

What I write is,  “We thought of ourselves as the Third Race.” And remember, this is part of a memoir, so let me historicize and personalize here. I’m speaking of the first half of the twentieth century (I was born in 1947), and a legacy that stretches back a few centuries. It was and tempting and comforting, if you were privileged a privileged black, (colored person or Negro were the usual terms then), to often think of yourself as separate, apart from the majority of blacks and the majority of whites. Blacks because they lacked your accomplishments, and whites because they were tainted – made ignorant -- by race prejudice.

 

 

For upper-class blacks, is there greater pressure to conform to white standards, or is there actually pressure to speak louder than less fortunate blacks?  It seems, in either case, society forces you to prove yourself to one side.

 

Both pressures exist, and of course your upbringing, your temperament, your ethical choices will drive your choices. But we have to be very meticulous about how we define “white standards,” and in what ways we speak up for and speak with blacks who have less power and access. Distinguish between what’s false and wrong in white culture and what’s valuable. Analyze our historical role in black history – what was honorable, what was dishonorable. And if we take real intellectual, political and emotional care, we don’t have to feel forced to choose or react defensively instead of acting creatively. 

 

 

You talk about the purported connection between blacks and Indians.  Why did you focus on this idea?

 

Again, let me be specific. In that Guernica piece, I was writing about the space where fact and myth have overlapped, again going back several centuries. Many blacks did and do have Indian ancestry  -- or “Indian blood” as we used to say. But even more of us wanted to have Indian ancestors. We saw Indians as a non-white people who had great physical beauty; -- straight hair, keen features, which something to crave – and, despite their oppression, a dignity that that the culture denied us. As Zora Neale Hurston wisecracked in her 1928 essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”: “…I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”

 

 

What is “Negro privilege?”

 

It’s a constant negotiation between what appear to be oppositions, like class privilege and caste discrimination, and the knowledge that depending on what setting you’re in, your status and sense of yourself –as perceived by others and as internalized by you – can change wildly.  Sometimes you’re in an Edith Wharton narrative; sometimes you’re in a James Baldwin one.

 

 

What do you think are the contributing factors to the race relations of present?  

           

History is relentless. Nothing is static. If societies (individuals too, don’t address their problems directly, those problems aren’t static. They get worse. The consequences get higher and higher. Structural injustice and corruption; the backtracking on, the repeal or repealing hard-won rights…the consequences get higher and higher.

 

 

When have you felt invisible?

 

That’s a huge question, covering a lifetime. Race-race invisibility has so many permutations. Right now I’d say what’s most typical is to be in a conversation – professional or personal – that has nothing to do with race, when suddenly race pops up, blatantly or subtly. Someone may start talking about “diversity” or welfare or out of the blue ask your opinion of a black artist or political figure. That’s visible invisibility – meaning, your particularity has vanished and you’ve become the other person’s race symbol or signifier.

 

 

Why are we just starting to pay attention?

           

Because we have no choice. Events have outstripped our ability to deny or minimize them.

 

 

How has the bias of mainstream media added to the flames?

 

Shoddy quick-fix reporting wanton “editorializing.”  Passions and prejudices flourish; rational thought, which is hard work, gets minimized or abandoned.

 

 

What stance should non-black minorities take in this movement?

           

Examine, document their own histories of injustice and struggle; study the similarities and the differences, as we blacks must also do. That’s how we’ll establish truly informed, mutually beneficial coalitions.

 

 

As a teacher, you are exposed to of my generation.  What do you think our next step should be, and where have we succeeded and/or failed?

           

Study history. And examine yourself, your personal history – family, class, race/ethnicity/religion and gender. Don’t leave the emotions – your desires, your irrational prejudices (we all have them) out of the examination. The psyche can trip the brain up.

 

 

Any final advice for our readers?

           

Never deny your own ambivalences and vulnerabilities. Work with them.