Chimanda Ngozi Adichie recently sat down with Tavis Smiley to talk about the film and book “Half of a Yellow Sun” as well as her best-selling book Americanah. When asked about why she wrote the novel, Adichie had this to say:

“I wanted to write about race in the U.S. as an outsider — as a person who came to the U.S. and became Black, because I didn’t think of myself of Black when I was in Nigeria. So race became this new identity for me when I came to the U.S. And I wanted to write about and how strange it can be.

Adichie also admitted that after experiencing microaggressive racism when she first came to the United States to study, for a while she didn’t want to be identified as black. She felt that blackness in the United States was “weighted” with negativity.

Her feelings changed after she immersed herself in African-American history. Watch the whole interview below.