She will always wear or carry something red, because red is her signature. When she started an H.I.V./AIDS awareness organization in 2009 that runs workshops around the country about its impact on women, she called it the Red Pump project because “shoes are my love language, and women love shoes.” More to the point, she said, “H.I.V. is a critical issue to women of color.”

She started the project when she met someone who had 20 cousins living with their grandmother because their parents had died of AIDS-related causes.

“If I have a contribution to make, it’s to get people to think hard truths, even when it’s difficult,” Ms. Ajayi said. Not that she disparages the importance of online activism, “but you have to understand that activism needs to go offline, too. You can be tweeting strangers and saying, ‘Don’t say that,’ but are you saying that to your friends? How about your mom? Your boyfriend at the dinner table who says something homophobic? If you’re not saying the same things in person that you’re saying online, then what are your tweets doing?”

Ms. Ajayi does not talk in detail about her life offline. Asked about a partner, she laughs and says, “I can neither confirm nor deny,” though she does show her supreme intelligence by noting she would never date a writer. Right now, she is focused on her book tour, which she has also branded. She handed out a Judgy Pop, the red lollipop on the cover of her book, to remember her by.

Ms. Ajayi was raised in a well-to-do family in Nigeria and moved to Chicago in 1994 with her mother and siblings. One of her most eye-opening chapters is about what she considers America’s distorted and monolithic view of Africa, a continent with “more languages and cultures than I can count,” as one large bastion of poverty and pestilence where children are covered in dust and “the flies buzzing around their heads are the mascots.” And, she points out, those Nigerian princes who need your bank account information? That image of Nigeria is sort of like deciding you know everything there is about Italians from watching “The Godfather.”