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“ ”You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, we have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.
About Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is an American journalist and author. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Isabel Wilkerson
Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.
They fly from the land: W. H. Stillwell, “Exode,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, March 12, 1881. The stanza reads: “They fly from the land that bore them, as the Hebrews fled the Nile; from the heavy burthens [sic] o’er them; from unpaid tasks before them; from a serfdom base and vile.
This is a civilization searching for its humanity,' Gary Michael Tartakov, an American scholar of caste, said of this country [during the pandemic of 2020]. 'It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own.