Nigerian - Writer | September 15, 1977 -
I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.
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I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.
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I'm a nice middle-class girl.
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I must have been an annoying child.
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This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come - this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don't we want it to be mainstream?
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Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self - to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.
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I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don't think that's true.
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From the very beginning, I think it's been quite clear that there's no way I could possibly say that trans women are not women. It's the sort of thing to me that's obvious, so I start from that obvious premise.
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I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.
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I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.
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I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.
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