Danger of a Single Story

Recently, I read a speech written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called "Danger of a Single Story." The three main ideas I picked up on while reading this speech was 1. Don't judge a book by it's cover 2. Don't let a single story define a person and 3. Tell multiple stories instead of one. Before I start talking about why I picked out these three main ideas, I'll give you a little background on the speech. In the speech, Adichie talks about how when she was younger, the only books that she read were British and American children's books even though she grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. She also used to write stories when she was younger and all of her characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather. She said "What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story." What she is trying to say is that being told only one story about a certain group of people over and over again will become embedded in your mind and will prohibit you from being able to form your own opinion about a specific person and will force you to just believe stereotypes. Adichie came from a middle-class Nigerian family where her father was a professor and her mother was an administrator.  They got a house boy and all her mother kept telling her was that their house boy, Fide, was poor. Since she was told over and over again by her family that Fide and his family were poor, that is all she ever thought of them. That was her only opinion of him and his family until she went to his village to visit and saw a beautifully patterned basket that his family had made. She didn't think they were capable of creating something so great simply because they were poor. She realized that their poverty was her single story of them.

When Adichie went to college, she experienced being at the other end of the stick when someone had a single story about her. Her roommate was shocked that she learned how to speak English so well. She asked if she could listen to what she called Adichie's "tribal music" and was very surprised when she produced her tape of Mariah Carey. She realized that her roommate felt sorry for her before she even saw her. Her roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe.

By only listening and believing a single story, you miss out on getting to know a person as an individual and having the pleasure of learning that they might not be anything like the single story that you were told. The point of this story was to in fact show the danger of a single story and to also try to encourage people to tell multiple stories instead of just one so that you don't judge a book by its cover and you don't let a single story define a person.

Have you ever let a single story determine your opinion of someone? Have you ever been a victim of a single story?