On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.”

For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary.

Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ”

[Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools]

But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained.

To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.

Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence.

In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.”

In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-​studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream.

As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.”

[From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America]

The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.”

Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.”

Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s.

Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing:

Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.

The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”:

We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul.

Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College.

seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.

[From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...]

Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another.

Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated  ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions.

Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown:

Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging.

Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.

In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued:

To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay.

Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses.

No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context.

[From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’]

“The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.”

Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”

The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

On the same day that the Access Hollywood tape landed, a month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton at the ballot box, the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie drew a surprising gender-related battle line of her own. In an October 2016 interview, she expressed mild displeasure that on Beyoncé’s track “Flawless,” the pop star had sampled (with permission) from Adichie’s by-then-famous 2013 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” “Her type of feminism is not mine,” she observed, politely calling Beyoncé out for giving “quite a lot of space to the necessity of men.” Hastening to say that she thinks “men are lovely,” Adichie envisioned a recalibration: “We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men … but otherwise we should also be talking about our own stuff.”

Dream Count, her fourth novel, is about how difficult this task actually is. Adichie is interested in women who, in certain ways, shrug off the patriarchal straitjacket of decades past, yet who also can’t quite manage to focus on their “own stuff,” letting men monopolize more than their allotted 20 percent. This is provocative cultural terrain—rife with historical and social and psychological (and biological) tensions—and the sort of ground that Adichie has nimbly traversed in her fiction before. In Dream Count’s predecessor, Americanah, she casts a satiric eye on race in America. Her well-heeled Nigerian protagonist Ifemelu navigates postcollege life—and sex and romance—in the United States, recording her reflections in a blog titled Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Like her creator, Ifemelu has an outsider’s knack for spotlighting the cruelties, vacuous niceties, and comic absurdities of race relations in a country caught between the past evils of slavery and Jim Crow, and the aspirational multiculturalism of a semi-enlightened 21st century.

But Adichie also provided Ifemelu a comparatively sanguine view of relations between the sexes. And it is precisely this optimism that has been scrubbed, more than a decade later, from Dream Count, an unusually dispiriting novel. Americanah’s incisive critique of race was set within a rom-com arc: Ifemelu ends up back home and in the arms of her high-school-and-college boyfriend, Obinze, whose own story of a brutal immigrant sojourn in Britain shares center stage in the novel. This time, Adichie’s protagonists are all women: three globally mobile Nigerians from the kind of upper-class backgrounds familiar from her earlier fiction, and one Guinean immigrant who has taken refuge in America, following her romantic partner.

Each is accorded her own section of Dream Count, yet their stories intersect and share a basic trajectory and bleak tone: Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women’s, the men’s—is for the most part unclear. Adichie’s protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent. If Adichie the feminist-manifesto writer is comfortable dispensing advice in the form of shoulds and should nots, Adichie the novelist seems allergic to such judgments.

Dream Count unfolds during the peak of the COVID era, yet reaches back to a time before Zoom screens and hoarded toilet paper. Chiamaka, a struggling travel writer quarantined in a suburban Maryland house purchased for her by her father, is the hub of the group, and her first-person narration opens and closes the novel. At 44, she’s been based in the U.S. for years but has resisted putting down roots, and she spends much of the novel reflecting on her history with men. She calls her self-imposed audit her “dream count,” which she uses as a softer-edged synonym for “body count.” This effort to reckon with her flings and love affairs speaks to the novel’s broader project: a bricolage of confusion, set against a backdrop of 21st-century feminism, with its unsatisfying forms of liberation, and traditionalist African patriarchy, with its equally unsatisfying constraints and at-times-violent indignities.

[Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America]

Adichie quite deliberately presents us with protagonists who have trouble sticking to that one-fifth time limit of thinking about men. Her quartet of characters is a lineup of familiar female archetypes. Chia is a romantic intent on true love, an adventurer forever seeking a soulmate. Her best friend, Zikora, is a striver eager to have it all—a lucrative legal career and a husband and children. Omelogor is Chia’s cousin, recently back home after a leave from her Nigerian finance job to study pornography in American graduate school; she’s an acerbic pragmatist who avoids serious relationships. And Kadiatou, Chia’s hired help, has been lured from Guinea by dreams and is shocked by permissive American mores. Motherhood, real and hypothetical, is front of mind for all, and expectations veer off course for each of them.

In Omelogor, Adichie seems to be reaching for another satirical guide on the model of Ifemelu, Americanah’s race-blogger protagonist: a participant observer of fraying gender dynamics, emotionally preoccupied with the opposite sex while also bemusedly untethered. For several years, Omelogor has been running a popular website, For Men Only, which takes off during the pandemic. There she dispenses anonymous but clearly female counsel about gender, sex, and romance, having decided that men need more than the pornographic tutelage they’re steeped in. She signs her missives with a lightly pandering flourish: “Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.”

But Omelogor is angry too (sometimes a symptom of depression, Chia notes). She’s well aware that despite the persona she creates for her blog, she is no expert on serious relationships, and she suspects that she may be too cynical and disillusioned to be on anyone’s side in the gender war, including her own. She cops to having returned from her American sojourn with “a jaundiced spirit and a mood like midnight.” Instead of enjoying the restorative break she’d hoped for (money laundering loomed large in her African banking work), she felt lonely and alienated, not least by “perfect righteous American liberals,” insistent that “you board their ideological train.”

Omelogor, who bridles at pigeonholing and being pigeonholed, is a study in contradictions. Online, she urges her readers to shower their partners with verbal affection—because “love needs tending”—while out in the world, she breaks off relationships at the first sign of a possible “emotion happening,” her term for falling in love. Dream Count is peppered with excerpts of For Men Only’s invariably banal advice (there are many ways to be a man, etc.), blog entries so anemic that you’re left wondering whether that’s the point: Nobody’s heart is really in communicating. Omelogor herself is skeptical that she can commit to truly opening up to others, in either her public or private life. When she was young, she chose aloofness because she “wanted to be free.” Now her general self-diagnosis is “disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment.”

That spirit pervades the COVID-haunted novel, as Adichie undercuts conventional assumptions about gender roles and attitudes. Tucked into Chia’s romantic quest for a “merging of souls” is a self-reliant ruthlessness more often associated with the male script. “I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances,” she reflects early on. “I didn’t want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.” In the relationship that stands out most in her memory—with a kindhearted Nigerian named Chuka, eager to marry and have kids, and great in bed—he’s the one left protesting that “I told you my intentions from day one.” She cannot come up with a reason for torpedoing it that will satisfy either him or herself, and instead admits simply: “I did not want what I wanted to want.”

[Read: America’s blindness to the racism all around us]

Adichie counterposes a more recognizable script for Zikora, who for all her confidence at work lacks Chia and Omelogor’s bold assurance with men. She’s endured a few insufferable boyfriends—classic narcissists—when she finds Kwame, a fellow lawyer with a background very different from hers: Reared in northern Virginia, he’s been pushed hard by his Ghanaian father and African American mother, “his dreams already dreamed for him.” But she’s thrilled to discover what feels like true intimacy: “So this was happiness, to live in the first person plural.” When he abruptly disappears at the news that she’s pregnant, she is stunned and can’t stop wondering how she could have made herself any clearer.

In some sense, Dream Count is a novel about inscrutable intentions: our own and those of other people. Why does Chia leave Chuka? Why does Omelogor cut and run at the first tremor of an “emotion happening”? Why does Zikora’s seemingly forthright boyfriend abandon her? Even as Adichie scatters hints (was Kwame more of a cowed son than Zikora grasped?), she is also explicit, in a closing “author’s note,” that sometimes the goal of a successful novel is to leave its tangles tangled. “To attempt to fictionally humanize a person,” she writes, means confronting

how we let ourselves and others down, how we emerge or don’t from our failings, how we are petty, how we try to overcome and strive to improve, how we seethe in our self-pity, how we fail, how we hold on tenaciously to hope.

Adichie, with her focus squarely on women, doesn’t hold back in Dream Count from revealing how her protagonists, in their romantic relationships, can be as deluded about themselves and their desires as they are about men and theirs. “Each day with Chuka, I encountered his otherness,” Chia reflects in a patronizing tone as she cites examples of his shirt-tucked-in, methodical ways: “sturdy, reassuring, uncreative.” However, Adichie also resists turning these uncoupled couplings into cautionary tales: Years later, Chia feels a belated tug of uncertainty about her decision to leave Chuka, but the reader is given no clear sense that she made the wrong choice, only that she made a sad one.

[Chimamanda Adichie: Nigeria’s hollow democracy]

Nor do conflicting African and American values get resolved, melded into a best-of-both-worlds fusion of beliefs. Zikora, overwhelmed with shame at being a single mother, is jolted into a new perspective on her own mother, who comes to help with her baby: She learns that a long-ago family rupture when her father took a second wife—an Igbo tradition when the first hasn’t produced a male heir—is more complicated than she had guessed. Kadiatou is a victim of female genital mutilation, and yet she’s taken aback when her Guinean boyfriend describes the practice as “barbaric.” She initially balks at his suggestion that she seek asylum on the pretext of sparing her own daughter from the cutting.

Asylum is not what Kadiatou, who is the most burdened of the four yet who also unexpectedly emerges feeling the most liberated, finds in America. She gets caught up in a justice system clearly not designed to serve people like her after she is assaulted by a rich and powerful man in the hotel where she has found work as a maid. The scene is harrowing but short, the procedural aftermath briefly hope-instilling. The police are called, the evidence gathered, the perpetrator identified. And then Kadiatou’s ordeal goes on and on: grueling interrogations that make her feel guilty and trip her up, while the monstrous VIP uses his fame and fortune to delay and delay.

The author’s note reveals that Kadiatou’s story is based on the real-life case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and hotel maid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund of assault in 2011. The case, Adichie reminds readers, was dismissed—not because prosecutors had proved the accused was innocent, but because the defendant’s lawyers felt that she had lied too much about her past for a jury to trust her. In the novel, Adichie vividly imagines the lawyerly grilling, the media hounding, the experience of being ambushed and isolated. And then, taking artistic license, she dispenses a fate that departs from Diallo’s; Kadiatou is granted a resolution that brings her huge relief, even if it undercuts the convictions of her far wealthier Nigerian friends.

In We Should All Be Feminists, the book that grew out of the TED Talk, Adichie observed that women are habituated to give up “a job, a career goal, a dream”; ultimately, as she put it, “compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.” In the end, none of Dream Count’s protagonists compromises, yet Adichie seems uninterested in turning this refusal into a feminist triumph. Their dreams don’t pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either.

We aren’t treated to a valorization of the nuclear family, or an African spin on resurgent tradwifery, or a paeon to the miracles of motherhood. “What am I supposed to do with him?” Zikora wonders about her baby. “There would be more days and weeks of this, not knowing what to do with a squalling person whose needs she feared she could never know.” Omelogor doesn’t hesitate to take a closing swipe at the special proclivity to pontificate that she encountered everywhere in the U.S.: “They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories,” she once ranted in a For Men Only entry that she deleted before posting but shares with us. She claims to detest the “provincial certainty” of Americans who are overconfident in their quick cultural judgments, yet Dream Count makes clear that the cosmopolitan uncertainty of the wealthy African abroad is not much better.