Taisha Farrow
T.Coleman
Eng 101
01/14/16
The Danger of a Single Story
In a Ted Talk video, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains the concept of her novel,”The Danger of a Single Story”. Overall, she argues that trying to interact with people or places knowing only one story or a single story makes it difficult to make connections, takes away one’s dignity, and creates both superiority and inferiority rather than equality. “The Danger of a Single Story” is that we begin to either feel like we’re greater,below, or extremely different from others rather than acknowledging our similarities and equality. When only going by what you see and hear, it makes us deaf and blind to different point of views.
As a child, Adichie read books that only consist of “characters that were white and blue eyed”. For her, this created a single story of books because before she found out about African literature, she believed that books could only be about foreigners. However she realized that books can actually contain “girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails”; characters just like her nature. This demonstrates the idea that people go by what they see or hear and not realizing there’s more around them to see and hear about.
Another thing Adichie mentioned in her experience with “the danger of a single story” was that her American roommate was shocked of how Adichie, as an African, really acted. She assumed based off of the catastrophe stories she hears about Africa, that “there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”. She thought that Adichie was completely different from her, that in which, the music she listened to, how well she can speak in English, and her capabilities was not to be even compared to an American. The roommate, having only the knowledge of a single story, thought that Adichie only listened to and only knows of African tribal music, she was shocked at how well she can speak English, and thought she didn’t know how to use a stove. This experience shows that by going by one story or one point of view that people can either think highly of you or poorly of you, which is dehumanizing one another and makes people feel that they are superior to each other.
I’ve never been through an experience where people have thought less of me based off of only one thing they knew about me, but I have made my assumptions sometimes just based off of what I’ve seen or from history. I remember when I went through a phase in my life where I just thought that I can never make friends with a white person because they can’t relate to anything about me. So, initially I’ve just never tried making Caucasian friends and to be honest, I wasn’t really surrounded by them to try anyway. I always felt that if I had a white friend that they would take advantage of me or feel like they’re better or higher than me. However, in my junior year of high school I met a Swedish female named Nova. She was a grade below me, so I automatically didn’t want to make friends with her. Me, personally, I like to stick to my own age group and higher, but that’s another story. Anyway, while sitting at a table with her in earth science for the whole school year, I really got to know her as a person and not as someone who is a different race from me. She’s really sweet, funny, smart,friendly, and we actually did have a lot in common. She never judges nobody and nobody judges her. So because of me making friends with her, I’ve open myself up more to different races and cultures. By the way, Swedish chocolate is delicious. In this experience, I realized that I had a single story of Caucasians, in which, I assumed that all of them think that they’re better than any minority and that we can’t connect at all. After becoming friends with a white person for the first time, it opened my eyes to the fact that not every white person is the same and that you have to give people a chance and understand them; judging them off of the past history of white people being superior to minorities. Not all of them are like this and being friends with one has no harm at all.
The danger of a single story makes us immune to trying to get to know or understand one another. It makes it hard to find connections within, when we only go by what we see and hear. Also, because of the things we see and hear it could either make us feel superior or inferior to others when really we are all equal. Getting more in depth with our interactions with people and places could help us easily get rid of The Single Story.
This is something I wrote for my English 101 class I had last semester. I picked this piece of writing out because I feel that it is really relate-able to the poems/spoken words we have been analyzing. A single story is what is described as only knowing one side to someone or something’s culture, background, life story etc. In this piece I had to explain the danger of a single story. It was based off of a Ted-talk video with an African author explaining how people only knew one side of something in her life and used assumptions to pre-judge her.