Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.

AT THE GROCERY STORE, Aunty Uju never bought what she needed; instead she bought what was on sale and made herself need it.

He had not been back to Nigeria in years and perhaps he needed the consolation of those online groups, where small observations flared and blazed into attacks, personal insults flung back and forth. Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

This perfectly describes a lot of Liberians who live in America

PS—Professor Hunk just suggested I post this, a test for White Privilege, copyright a pretty cool woman called Peggy McIntosh. If you answer mostly no, then congratulations, you have white privilege. What’s the point of this you ask? Seriously? I have no idea. I guess it’s just good to know. So you can gloat from time to time, lift you up when you’re depressed, that sort of thing. So here goes: When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult for you to join? When you go shopping alone at a nice store, do you worry that you will be followed or harassed? When you turn on mainstream TV or open a mainstream newspaper, do you expect to find mostly people of another race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race? When you apply for a bank loan, do you worry that, because of your race, you might be seen as financially unreliable? If you swear, or dress shabbily, do you think that people might say this is because of the bad morals or the poverty or the illiteracy of your race? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as “different” from the majority of your race? If you criticize the government, do you worry that you might be seen as a cultural outsider? Or that you might be asked to “go back to X,” X being somewhere not in America? If you receive poor service in a nice store and ask to see “the person...