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Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now.
This quotation, which comes from the blog post that ends Chapter 21, sums up Ifemelu’s realization that Americans do not differentiate between Black Americans and Black non-Americans. A major part of the post details the ways this conflation means that Black non-Americans need to accept and work within the rules of this identification in order to cope with the racist structures in America. Despite Aunty Uju’s insistence that Dike is not Black, Dike cannot escape the racism and microaggressions that Black Americans must deal with. While Ifemelu is at university, the Black Americans in her class become angry at Wambui’s disagreement with them over the use of the n-word in fiction. They are angry in part because they did not expect to have to explain the pain of the n-word to a person who looks Black, and because the white people listening could use Wambui’s reasoning to justify their own use of the word. In all these cases, attempting to ignore or go against expectations for Black Americans makes life more complicated and difficult for Black non-Americans.
