Nigerian moves to the US, becomes black

Excerpt from a great WaPo article by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

I was annoyed the first time an African American man called me "sister." It was in a Brooklyn store, and I had recently arrived from Nigeria, a country where, thanks to the mosquitoes that kept British colonizers from settling, my skin color did not determine my identity, did not limit my dreams or my confidence. And so, although I grew up reading books about the baffling places where black people were treated badly for being black, race remained an exotic abstraction: It was Kunta Kinte.

Until that day in Brooklyn. To be called "sister" was to be black, and blackness was the very bottom of America's pecking order. I did not want to be black.