Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

As a white male in America, I have privilege. As a white male who happens to be an artist with a fan base, I have a platform to spread awareness about that privilege. However, songs about race and privilege are very difficult to A) write and B) dissect as a listener. They're heavy.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

It's time we become comfortable with the uncomfortable conversations about race...Instead of being color blind, we need to be color brave.

I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

I never want to position myself where I seem like an ambassador of anti-racism. I am fortunate enough to say that I've never experienced extreme amounts of racism, but a lot of my friends do.

White people’s number one freedom, in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. We don’t have to learn about those who are other than white. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that we’re ignorant.

We never discuss race until something bad happens.

Whiteness in a racist, corporate-controlled society is like having the image of an American Express Cardstamped on one's face: immediately you are “universally accepted.”

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Race is a very sensitive subject.

While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

Eleanor Roosevelt could easily have told negroes the deceitful maneuvering of the United States government that was going on behind the scenes. She never did it. In my opinion she was just another white woman whose profession was to make it appear that she was on the negro's side. You have a lot of whites who are in this category. Therefore, they have made negro loving a profession.

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

I do wish that people talked about the subject of race, especially in the South.

If you want to know if racism is a problem in your country, you might not want to ask white people.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.

The interesting thing about white power and the desperate white knuckling grip on this thing call whiteness, which is a myth in itself, is that black folks... we're not asking you to invent new laws for us. We're asking you to include us in the laws that are already on the books.

If we had done the work that we should have done in the 20th century to combat our history of racial inequality, no one could win national office after demonizing people because they're Mexican or Muslim. We would be in a place where we would find that unacceptable.

People say, 'I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag.' Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism - i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad - to a structural understanding.

Most white people cannot answer the question, 'What does it mean to be white?' with any depth or complexity.

I think we are aware that post-racialism isn't real, right? I mean, I hope so. I kind of joke that we're post-post-racial.