Top 73 Quotes by Margo Jefferson

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.

New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.

There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.

I first wrote about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. His skin was growing paler, his features thinner, and his aura more feminine. Some called him a traitor to his race. Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a post-modern shape-shifter. But the shifts grew more extreme and mysterious.

Ralph Ellison's essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.

Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.