Margo Jefferson Quotes

I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage - though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

I was very young at the time, and I mainly appreciated their vocal qualities, even though I was already living as they did - as black performers in a white world.

It was rough being dark. I got heat from my own people more than anyone else. I remember going to my mom and saying, 'Why am I so black?' And she said, 'Because I'm black. You just gotta always work harder than the average bear.'

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.

If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American.

I love telling the experience of a black male in America, but modern, not always having to go back to a period piece to remind people where we come from. It's more a modern sense of where we are today and where we want to go in the future. So I try to choose projects somewhere around that space.

I'm an American, but being a black American, my experience is a particular one, my struggles have been particular.

I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things, so it is frustrating, to a degree, to be limited by other people's perceptions of me, but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy, and, you know, it's like I'm rooted in but not bound by.

What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.

I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.