Celebrated Feminist Writer Speaks Out After Wokeness Goes Too Far

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a surprising figure in the culture war.

Famed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a surprising figure in the culture war. One might expect Adichie, a self-described “feminist”, to come out in favor of woke ideology and join the ranks of activists who harass and harangue everyone around them into bending their knees for Black Lives Matter. Instead, Adichie has come out strongly against the mob with a personal blog describing her experience with those who would seek to proselytize virtue on social media but live out personal lives in contradiction to their sermons.

Adichie, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and multiple award-winning novelist, published her blog on Tuesday describing her experience with two writers who attended one of her writing workshops in Lagos. The students would later use her name to promote their own work while publicly condemning her for remarks they claimed were “transphobic”. In other words, they – like many other up-and-coming nobodies in the creative scene – attacked the reputation of an established figure to draw attention to themselves, towards their activism, in a shameless display of virtue signaling.

With cancel culture as their platform, the two writers embarked on a campaign to ruin their mentor’s reputation to elevate their own.

Adichie doesn’t name names. She doesn’t try to cancel the two female students and instead expresses her disappointment with having welcomed at least one of them into her life, which she said was an atypical occurrence for her. Despite offering counsel and personal advice, the student would later come out against her over a March 2017 interview in which Adichie declared that “a trans woman is a trans woman” (in apparent contradiction of the popular mantra that “trans women are women”).

This caused the student to fall out with Adichie, turning to social media to launch a tirade of attacks against her former mentor irrespective of Adichie’s larger explanation that everyone ought to be able to acknowledge their differences, and thus be inclusive of those differences.

The author expressed her regret that someone she had grown close to and regarded as a friend would publicly throw her under the bus over, seemingly, an issue of little significance.

Of course she could very well have had concerns with the interview. That is fair enough. But I had a personal relationship with her. She could have emailed or called or texted me. Instead she went on social media to put on a public performance.

The student sent an apology a few months after the initial attack, followed by another a year later, neither of which Adichie replied to – and with good reason. The student had shown the writer her true colors. There was no trust left, and no point for Adichie to accept those self-serving apologies. She made the right call, because not long after that, the student took to social media with more complaints about her, treating the silence as if it were a demand for obeisance. She promised more drama for her followers with more to tell about Adichie, who had long since cut off all contact with her former student.

“By suggesting there is ‘more’ when you know very well that there isn’t, you do sufficient reputational damage while also being able to plead deniability. Innuendo without fact is immoral,” Adichie wrote.

In the same blog, Adichie detailed the other student who had also engaged in a cancel campaign against her at the same time. Not only did this student condemn her for “transphobia,” the student also accused Adichie of being a “murderer.” While she was able to ignore the accusation, she’d find out later that the student would later include her name in their cover biography of a novel she’d never even read.

Adichie asks: “I didn’t like that I had not been asked for permission to use my name, but most of all I thought – why would a person who thinks I’m a murderer want my name so prominently displayed in their biography?”

The citation led to false attributions to the former student as a “protegee” of Adichie’s, which prompted a “Twitter tantrum” over the label, followed by disavowals of Adichie and claims that they’d never received any help from Adichie. Naturally, she sought to have her name removed from the book – and it worked.

This person has created a space in which social media followers have – and this I find unforgiveable – trivialized my parents’ death, claiming that the sudden and devastating loss of my parents within months of each other during this pandemic, was ‘punishment’ for my ‘transphobia.’

This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.

This person began a narrative that I had sabotaged their career, a narrative that has been picked up and repeated by others.

So what did we learn from this? Well, if you’re still reading this article, you just arrived at the good part: all of the history described by Adichie led to her writing perhaps one of the most cutting and accurate descriptions of any given member of the progressive left.

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.