It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.