Margo Jefferson: 'It’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race'

The Pulitzer-winning cultural critic talks about her new memoir Negroland, which reveals her life in Chicago growing up in a black elite, and explains why Black Lives Matter is right to take ‘respectability politics’ to task

Margo Jefferson’s memoir Negroland couldn’t have arrived at a more relevant time. As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to impact on the 2016 presidential campaign, the Pulitzer prize-winning cultural critic’s often painful personal critique, Negroland – the title refers to the “snobbish”, middle-class, light-skinned African American world she grew up in during her childhood in Chicago – is a powerful historical lens through which to read the current state of “respectability politics”.

We meet in a cafe near Jefferson’s home in New York’s Greenwich Village, the neighborhood which was once home to James Baldwin. She has spry, bright eyes which match her curly blonde locks, and there’s a playful elegance in the vivid turquoise scarf and pink necklace she wears against her black outfit.

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