We Americans are childish about our celebrities and icons. We worship, then we denounce; we identify passionately with them and then, if they do something - anything - we dislike, we cast them off.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how Americans have an inconsistent and often superficial relationship with their celebrities, idolizing them only to quickly turn against them.
Margo Jefferson's quote comments on the fickle nature of public admiration in American culture, highlighting a cycle of adoration and repudiation towards celebrities and icons. It suggests that Americans often elevate public figures to a pedestal, forming intense emotional connections, yet when those figures falter or behave in ways that displeases the public, they are rapidly discarded and criticized. This behavior indicates a deeper commentary on societal values and the ephemeral nature of fame, which can be brutally mercurial.
In practice
In a discussion about the changing nature of celebrity culture on social media.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
The transgender community has always been a part of Hawaiian society, where people who don't conform to the binary system of man/woman, masculine/feminine are accepted or, at minimum, tolerated.
If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.
There's a tradition - in New Orleans it still exists - where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.
We know so much about the European food story, and we're getting to know about the American food story; but we know so little about the African food story.
Hip-hop has done more for race relations than most cultural icons; and I say save Martin Luther King, because his 'I Have A Dream' speech was realized when Obama was elected into office.
African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.
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