4 Analysis: How Racism Alienates Ifemelu from Herself 

Ifemelu’s time in America is, in many ways, a classic coming-of-age story, following the protagonist as she seeks to form her own identity in an often chaotic world. Her experience relates to Goffman’s performance of self in that we see her struggle to form an identity that is at once authentic and yet palatable to the people with whom she surrounds herself, who are often upper-class, white Americans far more privileged than she. Throughout the novel, we see Ifemelu act as a chameleon-esque figure, altering her demeanor and tone to mirror that of the people she’s surrounded by at a given moment. In this sense, she grapples between the social expectation to perform for the audience and her personal desire to stay authentic to herself, a struggle that is made more complicated by the various forms of racism that Ifemelu encounters during her years in the United States.

A. Ifemelu’s Performance of Self

The two men Ifemelu dates in America, Curt and Blaine, help manifest this internal conflict. Ifemelu cannot be fully herself with either man: she has to hide certain parts of her identity, or manufacture parts of her identity that do not correspond to her true self. Adichie writes of Ifemelu during her relationship with Curt, “She was lighter and leaner, she was Curt’s Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress” (Adichie 2013: 241-242). It is particularly notable that Ifemelu is explicitly said to be playing a “role,” as though she were acting in a performance — evoking Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective — and not truly being her authentic self. In her relationship with Curt, she never seems fully comfortable, and instead remains acutely aware of the fact that she does not seem to fit into Curt’s old-monied lifestyle. People often express surprise at them being together, giving them looks or even making remarks, making it difficult for Ifemelu to inhabit her new role or fully relate to Curt.

Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine, while different in many ways from her experience dating Curt, similarly forces her to be inauthentic and play a role tailored to her audience. His friends are intellectual to the point of elitism, which impacts the way she presents herself to them; his sister Shan also intimidates Ifemelu and makes her feel that her authentic self is inadequate. At the surprise birthday party thrown for Blaine’s friend, Ifemelu acts entirely different than she does in spaces such as the salon where she gets her hair braided, a behavioral shift driven largely by the fact that there are fewer Black people present. The guest list of the party includes people like Stirling, a white man who hails from old money, and Paula, a white woman who used to date Blaine. In short, it is a more intimidating space for Ifemelu to be in, and we can see the effect of the environment on how she chooses her word and conducts herself. At the hair salon, in contrast, she tailors her speaking style and presentation of self to mirror that of the ladies working there, who are Black. This variance shows her ability, whether conscious or not, to code-switch in order to fit into her environment. For example, Ifemelu comments on the heat in the hair salon, thinking that “at least, these women would not say to her ‘You’re hot? But you’re from Africa!’” (Adichie 13). This thought reveals the extent to which Ifemelu is aware of her environment and the different reactions that her comments might elicit in each. In both settings, she is performing for an audience and recognizes the importance of tailoring her performance to that particular audience.

This is true, too, when she meets Blaine and adjusts her demeanor to please him and his friends. Cooley would attribute this to the “looking-glass self”: Ifemelu is acutely aware of how others perceive and respond to her. In turn, she internalizes these perceptions. She comments, “When you are black in America and fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters […] But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable” (Adichie 2013: 359). Ifemelu’s observations here reflect the role of power in shaping the dramaturgical performance of self. When the audience is in a position of power over the performer, as Ifemelu’s white liberal friends are over her, this further limits the performer’s abilities; we can see this borne out both quantitatively, in the statistics introduced earlier, and qualitatively. Ifemelu is also recognizing that while there are fleeting moments when she feels that she can be herself — when she is alone with Blaine — anytime that she is in public, she has to play a role and be someone she is not. Paradoxically, however, the social capital (Bourdieu 1986) that comes along with dating these men — especially Curt — is what empowers Ifemelu to slowly reclaim facets of her identity that she had previously hidden. Once she is entrenched in her relationship with Curt, a wealthy white man, she finally embraces her natural hair, beginning to wear it unbraided and unrelaxed. Even still, these changes are not permanent, and Ifemelu never feels fully unencumbered by social norms or expectations; when she changes her hairstyle, she worries constantly about what others think and still feels the pressure to perform weighing on her. The stigma of being in an interracial relationshpi, moreover, never fully subsides — and it is Ifemelu, not Curt, who shoulders the burden of people’s judgments. It is not until Ifemelu returns to Nigeria and reunites with Obinze, her long-lost lover, that she can cease performing for others.

Apart from her relationships, Ifemelu’s experience as an immigrant further forces her to assume a persona that deviates from her true self, making the true Ifemelu invisible to the rest of society. Prompted by Aunty Uju, she uses another person’s Social Security card so that she can work legally, but this makes her feel disconnected from her own name and identity. The extent of this alienation is made clear when Ifemelu expresses joy at receiving a piece of junk mail addressed to her real name: she has been so overlooked and unrecognized by society that even the smallest acknowledgment feels like a godsend. In many ways, this is the experience of the classic Simmelian “Stranger,” an outsider attempting to ingratiate themselves within a new group. For a stranger, their “position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (Simmel 1950). Ifemelu is reminded every day that she has not belonged to the “group” of people living in America “from the beginning”; being situated as an outsider heightens the pressure for her to perform her role as an American flawlessly so as to lessen the stigma of being the “Stranger.” The Stranger, however, does have unique insight into the society they enter — by joining the group as a neutral, unbiased observer, they can see the group’s workings and operations in a way that in-group members cannot. This is part of what ultimately makes Ifemelu’s blog so engaging and captivating: she looks at race relations in America through fresh lenses, allowing her a more unfiltered perspective, and the ever-increasing number of immigrants from Africa to America suggests that this may be a growing trend. Even still, the psychological toll of being the “Stranger” — and of never fully escaping this role despite many years in the United States — makes it an unfavorable position for Ifemelu to find herself in.

Moreover, Ifemelu’s experience echoes many DuBoisian writings, which focused extensively about the invisibility that Black people feel in America as a consequence of being hidden behind the veil and therefore ignored by white America. To assimilate into American society, Ifemelu feels acute pressure to change or lie about who she is. She gets into a habit of fibbing about how many years she’s lived in the States so that her “audiences” will take her more seriously; she also begins to practice an American accent so that she can be treated like a “normal” American after an unpleasant encounter with a woman at her university who speaks with a slow, exaggerated diction that makes Ifemelu feel like “a small child” (Adichie 163). Ifemelu does this so consistently that it becomes second nature to her — even when she has been in the United States long enough that there is no point to exaggerating, she does so instinctively, lying about it to her hairdresser in the salon. This reflects the danger of constantly performing for others: at a certain point, the inauthentic parts of one’s identity can subsume the real identity, causing one to lose track of who they really are. Goffman touches on this phenomenon, writing that when an “individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others” (Goffman 1959: 229). The concept Goffman introduces here is applicable not only to Ifemelu but also to the immigrant experience more generally. As a consequence of the burdens she is forced to assume in America, from racist or xenophobic sentiment to the pressure to be someone she is not, Ifemelu grows increasingly disconnected from the person she was before coming to the United States.

B. Social Constructions — And Misconceptions — of Race

Americanah shows not only that race is a social construct but further demonstrates how damaging hegemonic narratives around race can be for ethnic and racial minorities. Essentially, the racial categorizations that govern society have nothing to do with biological differences between races and instead are arbitrary categories that we ourselves have constructed. They are hegemonic narratives whose origins are not rooted in science, and they change depending on the historical or geographic situation of a society. DuBois explains that “Race is a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating” (DuBois 1915: 32). Because race is inherently a social construct, the ways in which it is constructed differ between societies depending on a society’s historical or geographic situation. We see this throughout the novel, where white people in America constantly conflate Africans like Ifemelu with African-Americans like Blaine, underscoring the extent to which race is socially constructed. Although Ifemelu may consider herself as quite different from Blaine, this is treated as largely irrelevant: the two groups of people are amalgamated together, as DuBois predicted. The consequences have implications not only for Ifemelu but also for her relationship with Blaine: the two fight because Blaine feels that Ifemelu is not doing enough to support the African American community, while Ifemelu feels that this is not her duty or her inclination. In one particularly contentious argument, Blaine finds out that Ifemeu has skipped a speech Blaine was giving at a rally, and the couple even break up for a few days. This encounter only underscores how alone Ifemelu is in America, and how much of a “Stranger” she truly is: she cannot rely on even her own partner for the understanding of what it means to be an African immigrant in the United States.

Similarly, Ifemelu’s cousin Dike is treated as Black despite his mother’s insistence that he is not — his experience shows that in American society, it matters very little how you personally identify, what matters most is how you’re perceived by society at large. It is also an interesting quirk of American society that racism functions under the “one-drop rule,” which posits that if a person has even a single “drop” of Black blood, they are constructed as Black, an identity which takes precedence over their other racial identities. In other countries, this is not the case, as seen in the short stories discussed in Part III as well as Howard Winant’s The World is a Ghetto, which show how race is constructed differently in South Africa. Ifemelu addresses this subject in her blog, writing, “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” (Adichie 2013: 273). As DuBois predicted, the people who hold social power also dictate what race means, and the consequence is the erasure of Ifemelu’s — and Dike’s — identity. Ifemelu’s assertion that “America doesn’t care” highlights how much of our identity is preconceived for us by “America,” or more specifically, the most powerful people in America: wealthy, white men. Constructions of race differ significantly from Nigeria to Africa, and Ifemelu receives differential treatment accordingly, further complicating her adjustment to American life.

C. Colorblindness: The Last Stage of Subtle Racism 

A byproduct of this socially-constructed view of race is the refusal of Americans to address underlying racial tensions or nuances; instead, the prevailing attitude is to ignore race altogether and instead pretend that we live in a color-blind society. When Ifemelu and her friend Gimika visit a clothing store and she is asked to name the salesgirl who helped her out, the cashier does not ask whether it was the white or Black salesgirl, instead awkwardly dancing around mentions of race. Gimika explains afterward, “‘This is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things” (Adichie 2013: 155). This affectation of colorblindness, as Michelle Alexander explains, does nothing to improve race relations in America; if anything, it only exacerbates the existing problem. DuBois would likely agree with this statement; in his writing, he explains that despite the racism he faced in America, he still has no desire to make his race invisible: “I resented the defensive mechanism of avoiding too-dark companions in order to escape notice and discrimination in public. As a sheer matter of taste I wanted the color of my group to be visible” (DuBois 1940: 42). DuBois shows here that in many ways, for a Black person to acknowledge and embrace their racial identity is an act of resistance against an oppressive system seeking to erase it. Colorblindness robs Black people of this opportunity and, as such, is another pillar in the racism that pervades America.

Colorblindness perpetuates the idea that to be Black is somehow shameful and that, therefore, to acknowledge somebody as Black is taboo and off-limits. It is nothing more than a facade that is strategically deployed to avoid confronting the continued presence of racism in America. And the impact that hegemonic colorblindness has on Ifemelu — she grows uncomfortable discussing race and unsure of what is considered taboo to say or do — only alienates her from her sense of self and identity. The intersecting nature of these social phenomena and means of social control form a matrix of oppression that affects Ifemelu’s life and identity in profound ways.