Ahead of her new memoir, the critic talks about her current pop culture obsessions and why she identifies with Nina Simone
When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards ceremony last month Margo Jefferson had stepped away from her TV for a moment. Like millions of us, she watched it on replay, absorbing the sheer novelty of a normally stage-managed spectacle collapsing into chaos. As it happened, the incident crystallised several Jeffersonian themes: televised glamour, Black entertainers, and the question of how to behave in public. In her 2016 memoir Negroland, about the lifestyles and mores of the Black elite in mid-century America, Jefferson recalls her parents dissecting the TV performances of Sammy Davis Jr, Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, and describes the oppressive power of the dictum “everything we do must reflect well on the race”.
But times have moved on, she believes. Both Rock’s routine, in which he joked about Smith’s wife, Jada, and Smith’s response struck her as immature more than anything else. “They’re too old,” she sighs. “They are definitely too old and they should be too astute for these shenanigans.” Speaking to me from her apartment in New York’s West Village, in which the only physical objects appear to be books, she says: “That kind of old ‘respectability’ question did not really enter into it for me.” Why not? “Black culture, and our range of behavioural possibilities and choices, has expanded.” Judged as a performance, however – the critic in her is rarely stilled for long – it was simply cheap, juvenile, “staged hood theatrics”. “I wish it had been handled by Jada herself.”
