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Quote by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.”

Quote by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Book:Friday Black
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Friday Black

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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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“When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.”

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“african american women are easy. inferior. africans are dirty. jungle people. african americans are lazy. indolent. african people are too black. ugly. african americans think they are better than us. africans think they are better us. –– listen to the sound of us | we are breaking our mothers heart | the ancestors weep at how much we look like the hate that came to eat us”

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