It also brought the rare wealth of discovering African American literature, those stories full of such graceful grit. To be Black was to feel, in different circumstances, frustration, anger, irritation, and wry amusement. To be Black was to realize that it was impossible for people to approach one another with the simple wonder of being human, without the specter of race lying somewhere in the shadows. To be Black in America was to feel bulldozed by the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives. In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world. Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin color. I had never before thought of myself as “Black” I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them. It was not a choice-my chocolate-colored skin saw to that-but a revelation. This article is adapted from the introduction to the forthcoming tenth-anniversary edition of Americanah.
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