In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world. Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin color. I had never before thought of myself as “Black” I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them. It was not a choice-my chocolate-colored skin saw to that-but a revelation. This article is adapted from the introduction to the forthcoming tenth-anniversary edition of Americanah.
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