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 matter...
When I lost my whole family, every single one, it was as if I had been born all over again, Inatimi told Richard in his quiet way. I was a new person because I no longer had family to remind me of wha...
What struck me – with her and with many other female American friends I have – is how invested they are in being ‘liked’. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very importa...
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We
We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have des...
We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something.
We raise girls to see each other as competitors—not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion can be a good thing—but for the attention of men.
We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.
We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.
We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask th...
We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.
We are living in a time of great white evil. They are dehumanizing blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia, they fermented what happened in the Congo, they won’t let American blacks vote, they won’t let t...
We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just m...
Was it the one with long hair? the cashier asked. Well, both of them had long hair. The one with dark hair? Both of them had dark hair. Ginika smiled and looked at the cashier and the cashier smiled a...
Understanding America for the Non-American Black: Thoughts on the Special White FriendOne great gift for the Zipped-Up Negro is The White Friend Who Gets It. Sadly, this is not as common as one would...
Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich fo...
Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol—in small amounts.
Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were usele...
Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it’s not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is.