Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A "New York Times" Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: "The Washington Post," "Los Angeles Times," "Time," "Vanity Fair," "Marie Claire," "Time Out New York," "Minneapolis Star Tribune," "Kansas City Star," "Men s Journal," "Oprah."com
Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. In these pages, Jefferson takes us into this insular and discerning society: I call it Negroland, she writes, because I still find Negro a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.
Negroland s pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South. It evolved into a world of exclusive sororities, fraternities, networks, and clubs a world in which skin color and hair texture were relentlessly evaluated alongside scholarly and professional achievements, where the Talented Tenth positioned themselves as a third race between whites and the masses of Negros, and where the motto was Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment. At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, "Negroland" is a landmark work on privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America."