98 Quotes by Margo Jefferson

Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people have had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren’t looking. Keep a close watch.

I crave the gift of recreational shallowness. The trick of knowing when to be cleverly trivial, lightweight; when to avoid emotional excess.

The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want.

Nadinola Bleaching Cream: “Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?

She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.

And white women can reform nothing until and unless they are willing to relinquish their caste privilege, those codes of racial and social superiority they extol in their men and instill in their children.

Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.

I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.

I have cuts and bruises that do not map a course.