# IT IS OBSCENE : A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS
## Metadata
- Author: [[Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]]
- Full Title: IT IS OBSCENE : A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS
- Category: #articles
- Summary: insert summary
- My notes:
- Summary: When a public figure is falsely criticized, silence can sometimes allow the lie to take on the shimmer of truth, as happened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A young woman who attended her Lagos writing workshop insulted her on social media, despite having a personal relationship with Adichie. The woman also used Adichie's name to apply for an American visa, published a novel that included Adichie's name on the cover, and called her a murderer on social media. Adichie eventually asked that her name be removed from the novel's cover biography.
- URL: https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/
## LLM Chats
## NotebookLM
## LLM Audio
## Highlights
> IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS
> Posted at 05:36h in by [Chimamanda Adichie](https://www.chimamanda.com/author/admin/)
> **PART ONE** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j533m9323jrbtkjd4acdm180))
> You will wrap your mediocre malice in the false gauziness of ideological purity. But it’s still malice. You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of a person who had shown you only kindness. You can call your opportunism by any name, but it doesn’t make it any less of the ugly opportunism that it is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j5atk8rgsv9n3arp29jnwg5y))
> asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j533tqw7c64f0mj7xkz0at40))
> 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j5atyad20bwz7jvyxh255qgh))
> 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j5av32s9s1ecp1164zh2hcg2))
> 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.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j5av3v0pgv3em05x4dcqcvye))
> 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j5av5j0w81zwk5t7qgtmvfdr))