(Some of) Ifemelu's Views on Africans and African-Americans

 

Upon looking at the different prompts for the essay about Americanah, the fourth on the list stood out to me. I wanted to share a couple of parts of the book that address it:

Ifemelu’s views on the difference between African Americans and Africans evolves drastically throughout the book. While babysitting Dike during her first summer in America, Ifemelu speaks with Jane, Aunt Uju’s neighbor. Jane casually mentions their family is moving to the suburbs so that her daughter, Elizabeth, does not “…start behaving like these black Americans,” (Adiche, 137). Ifemelu responds with simply “What do you mean?” (Adiche, 137) and is told that she will understand in time. When she first arrives in America, Ifemelu does not fully comprehend the race relations that exist not in law, but in the culture of United States. Since race was not important to Ifemelu back in Nigeria, she is able to be portrayed as a blank canvas by which Adiche describes her own personal feelings about the distinction between African Americans and African Immigrants in America.

In time, Ifemelu does indeed understand. When she first met Blaine, “She knew right away that he was African-American”, (Adiche, 217) and she was able to tell “…sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanor, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people,” (Adiche, 217). Even though Ifemelu is able to tell the difference between Africans and African Americans, she does not necessarily discriminate between the two in any meaningful way. For Ifemelu, the difference between the two is not viewed through a racist lens, but as a character trait. She does not look down on Blaine for being African American, she just notes that it affects his physical traits in a way that she admires.

While Ifemelu views race more like nationality more than skin color, she notes that Americans widely only look at the color of your skin. In Ifemelu’s blog post, “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby” (Adiche 273-275), she goes into great detail about the absurdity of classifying people based on skin color rather than culture. One of many examples that she gives is “[Non-American Blacks] must show that [they] are offended when words such as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if [they] don’t know what the hell is being talked about… and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are you won’t know” (Adiche 273). The entire blog post is dripping with sarcasm like this quote to highlight that Adiche strongly believes that racial solidarity should not have to exist. Although the blog post explicitly calls for solidarity, the tone of the passage gives the mental image of Adiche actively rolling her eyes whenever she uses the second person. The blog’s numerous examples explain to its readers that even if they try to be one of the “good blacks”, it won’t do them much good unless they act perfectly in accordance with the views of other races.