Single Story Essay

In 2009 Chimamanda Adichie gave a TED talk about the ‘danger of a single story’. A single story meaning, one thought or one example of a person becoming what we think about all people that fit that description, a stereotype if you will. In today’s America, I believe that we have all felt the wave of stereotypical views at some point or another. Adichie gives many relatable examples throughout her life of how she has been affected by the single story. Her story brings about an issue that all humans, from every inch of the earth, have come to understand on some level. A young child reading only foreign books, a domestic helper that she only perceived as poor. Her college roommates single story about Africans and her own formation of a single

Before meeting Adichie her roommate says that she felt sorry for her simply because she was African. Her roommates single story of Africans kept her from seeing Adichie as anything other than other than a rural villager that listened to tribal music, and cooked over a fire (Adichie 4:54). It took meeting Adichie and forming a human connection with her to change the roommate’s perspective. Having fell victim to this sort of stereotype, I find it necessary to find the layers beneath the shell of a human. When we hear a person’s name, we most often immediately assume they fit into the box that matches the name. In this case, the roommate heard the name and associated it with all the things she knew about Africa. However, there is so much more to a person, the roommate couldn’t have known that Adichie spoke perfect English and listened to Mariah Carey not tribal music, because she only associated the name with her limited version of

She talks about how after writing her novel she was conversing with an American who had just read the novel. He stated that it was a shame how Nigerian men where physical abusers, such as the man in her novel had been. She is quick to tell him that she ’ had just finished reading the novel American Psycho, and that it was a shame that all young American men were serial murders’ (Adichie 11:04). It is here that we see how a single story can affect our image of a group of people. Obviously, not all Nigerian men are abusers, in the same sense that not all American men are serial murders. The man that she was talking to had made an inference based on reading one Nigerian book, a single story. She goes on to say that because of Americas economic and political power she had read many novels about America, resulting in many stories, widening her perception of