Margo Jefferson Quotes

Sadly, black people disassociate ourselves from the things which make us who we are, identifying them as lesser, or inferior. It's a form of self hate. So, with reckless abandon, we strive to be like the majority.

I wanted everything. What could you not want when you are brown and Indian-looking in a society in which the white aesthetic is praised as acceptable?

People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!

I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian community, and most of my friends had blonde hair and blue eyes. So I was always straightening my hair, wearing colored contacts, and I never tanned, if I could help it.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

There's a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.

Growing up, I was constantly labeled an 'oreo' by my black peers because of my proper speech and 'valley girl accent.'

Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred - for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.

I read in 'Life' magazine that Asians had developed an operation to enlarge eyes, and I yearned to have this done. I wanted to dye my hair brown and to anglicize my name. Self-hate was the most terrible cost of the war years for me.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.'

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that weird in-between thing.

I'm light skinned, and I used to lean on that because that's something a lot of black people pride themselves on, and it's weird.

The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

Out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul.

If you are a black athlete, celebrity or media personality living, socializing, working, studying or dating in the white community, the easiest way to stop Twitter trolls from spamming your social media with accusations of race betrayal is to celebrate BLM. If you’re an educated, nerdy, proper-speaking black person who has been chastised for “acting white” by your black peers, supporting BLM salvages your black image.

I was always told that I acted too white. I was always told that I was going to date a white guy - which, in fairness, was true: I do have a white boyfriend. So they weren't entirely wrong, but all of those things were really damaging.

I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin, and my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned. The morning would come, and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first.

I grew up just outside New York City in a very white town. In seventh grade, I got called Macy Gray. It really affected me, so I got a weave and wore my hair straight.