Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

I'm aware that not everybody gets that feeling of ease walking through the world that I have.

I never thought of being disadvantaged.

We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.

Ignorance is bliss, or so we're told. Personally, I find ignorance is also destiny.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

I'm just interested in having a handle on my environment.

We can scale the heights of mountains and see the world rayed out before us, but we fail to recognize that which is before us.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

I want nothing to do with privilege.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Do you know, it's funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.

The essence of racism is prejudice coupled with power ... Our primary experience is one of white privilege, even in places where whites may be a minority in the surrounding population.

Sometimes I leave an encounter or a conversation hoping that I didn't come off as above my raisin' - hoping that I didn't make somebody feel bad for not having as much as we're fortunate to have.

Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.

Visibility has an effect on those who are privileged; it brings more privilege, and on those who are marginalized, it brings more marginalization, because it also brings a spotlight onto them where they're at, in the hood or in certain places that are less tolerable.

I shouldn't have to be preparing my children that the world is going to be unfair to them for the rest of their lives.

There's nothing wrong with being help. But it's very wrong that we presume people of colour are in a subservient position. That's problematic.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.