Performative Acts in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Americanah”

It has taken me a while to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, but I picked it up recently because my daughter suggested it as one of the books she wanted us to talk about on our podcast Classics & Coffee. There’s a lot in Americanah, and I do not have the space to even scratch the surface of topics that Adichie covers. Today, I want to focus on the speaking engagements that companies offered to Ifemelu once the popularity of her blog, Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Knows as Negroes) by a Non-American Black, started to receive praise and a large readership. The increased recognition led corporations and educational institutions to reach out to Ifemelu for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings.

The organizations reached out to Ifemelu to speak at these DEI events to check a box and to signal to their constituents that they were engaged with DEI work when in fact all they were doing was virtual signaling and placing a paper-thin mask over their true selves. Ifemelu confronts their false posturing at her first DEI speaking engagement for “a small company in Ohio.” She entitled her talk “How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races”; however, when she looked at the crowd, she noticed that the entire audience was white, and she asked herself who these people at the…