Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

Racial affiliations are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second - and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted

When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.

There are a lot of people in Beverly Hills who come from the Middle East, who are very much a part of the Beverly Hills fabric, and their kids grew up with the privileges of Beverly Hills. And yet they still have to deal with a lot of the prejudice against them for being foreign-born.

I feel Scottish when with English people, and when I'm with Scottish people, I realise I'm English.

I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

Antiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins.

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

As soon as you say that there is a community called, let's say, black Americans, you've immediately created a boundary line - who's in that group, who's outside that group.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization

They are already here...they are called Hungarians!

I don't like identity. We accept identities in Israel. We make them holy. But what does identity really mean?

I'm a white guy in a black sport. I really forget about it until someone asks me about it. I'm simply competing in a sport that I love.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

I want to say that I can be Moroccan and speak about someone without speaking about his nationality. Because, you know, I have the feeling that when you come from Morocco, when you come from Afghanistan, when you come from Africa, Occidental people always wait for you to write a novel about identity.

Each time I visit Japan, I am reminded of how Canadian I am and how little racial connection matters.