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Lawrence Otis Graham is a sprightly gossip in the Clamorgan mode: he writes largely for white magazines and is considered something of an upstart by old-line blacks. His 1999 Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class is a cross-country social whirl of interviews and personal anecdotes. Graham chronicles our old ways, and makes sure to certify their current value with the status symbols of integration; "exclusive" and "prestigio..
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Margo Jefferson |
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Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We
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Margo Jefferson |
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The human psyche is pathetic," I say-I declaim-to my psychopharmacologist. "It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have." And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best. There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself,..
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Margo Jefferson |
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Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.
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Margo Jefferson |
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Being agreeable' is the highest duty of any human being mingling with other people....Practicing good manners should be as natural as displaying the teeth")."
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Margo Jefferson |
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too, rolled and
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Margo Jefferson |
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Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We
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Margo Jefferson |
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I've never been so sick of RACE in my life. Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPS compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for..
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Margo Jefferson |
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Cyprian Clamorgan ends
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Margo Jefferson |
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Nadinola Bleaching Cream: "Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?"
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Margo Jefferson |
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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.
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Margo Jefferson |
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You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You've acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation (not an untrue one,though not quite sufficient) is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements (institution's, people's), by so much dread of disapprov..
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independence
identity
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Margo Jefferson |
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White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.
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whiteness
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Margo Jefferson |
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I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties.
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Margo Jefferson |
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Elbow grease" is not a metaphor."
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Margo Jefferson |
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We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him."
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Margo Jefferson |
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And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.
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Margo Jefferson |
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What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.
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Margo Jefferson |