Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”

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 in charge,” do you expect that this person will be a person of another race? If a traffic cop pulls you over, do you wonder if it is because of your race? If you take a job with an Affirmative Action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? If you want to move to a nice neighborhood, do you worry that you ...