Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Who, adult or child, is Michael Jackson truly close to? What and who is he trying to flee? What’s the nature of the psychic damage he has so clearly sustained? I suspect his racial identity is more a byproduct of that damage than the primal cause. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Many say that no real avant-garde – which I’ll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists – can exist anymore. The media’s reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
I was taught you don’t tell your secrets to strangers – certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Even criticism is more interesting when the writer’s authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring – that’s one of the most interesting possibilities. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
My individual way of taking on the burdens of history has changed. I don’t think of them only as burdens; I think they are honorable. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Yes, for blacks, racism functions without the actual presence of whites, just as for whites it functions without the actual presence of blacks! Beliefs, conventions, history do the work. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
I think the most harmful belief passed on to me – not always directly – was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
