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Summary of the danger of single story
The danger of single story
Summary of the danger of single story
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Not too long ago, I had the luck of encountering a video on Youtube called The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this video, Ms. Ngozi Adichie delicately talked about stereotypes that we have sculpt, not only in a personal scale, but as a society. There was a phrase Ms. Ngozi Adichie said that I been quoting since then: “The problem with Stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete”; And this comes hand on hand with this article. The more you interact with someone, the more you understand their foundation and what their principles are. I think is phenomenal that so many influential companies are taking a step forward towards the awareness of unconscious bias, and is even more exciting the fact
that they are making these tools available for smaller businesses or enterprises that don’t have the means to develop a way of dimmer these hidden biases. I also believe, that we have evolved as a society. Putting things in perspective, twenty years back, we wouldn’t be reading this article or we wouldn’t be trying to tackle these issues. The fact that leaders are taking diversity at the workplace to a whole new level, putting more emphasis on the meritocracy nature of the company (in my opinion) is synonym of not racial, not socio-economical, not political, not cultural, but HUMAN development.
In many circles of the world, various groups of people distinguish themselves from one another through religion, language, culture, and sometimes gender. People also develop stereotypes about a particular group of people in order to identify them. However, most of the time, these stereotypes hold true for only some members of a group. Sometimes, these stereotypes are just plain misconceptions that do not even apply to the group it claims to. Stereotypes are placed on people because it is a way to easily identify what type of person or ethnicity an individual is. At one point in time, these stereotypes may have been true; however, in today’s modern society, most of these stereotypes are outdated and false, which leads them to turn into misconceptions. Usually, stereotypes are utilized to humiliate and degrade the person or group; they also do not provide any beneficial outcomes. Stereotypes focus on how a particular group acts because of the radical ideas and actions of the few, how a particular group looks, or how that group is physically lacking in some way. These stereotypes often lead to conflicts because the group does not appreciate the way it is being perceived. Seldom are the stereotypes placed on a group of people truthful and accurate. Some hardly even apply to the particular group people it claims to. It is true that how people are perceived has a big impact on how other individuals interact with them; however, people are not perceiving these groups correctly.
Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, authors of Anti-Bias Education: for Young Children and Ourselves, provide a great example of an internal bias that results in unfair judgments. “One example is if you were raised to believe that being prompt is a sign of responsibility, and your family always had a car, then it might be hard for you to comprehend the experience of low-income families who chronically drop their children off late due to unreliable buses (pg. 21).” It is little anecdotes like those that make you evaluate your pure un-bias tendencies against certain social identities.
In our global economy requiring functional and respectful relationships between nations, prejudice and stereotypes can be a destructive force both in the world and in individual societies, especially in diverse ones.
Chimamada Adichie states “That is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” By this she is meaning that many times, stereotypes are formed about a single race or country and only that one side of an opinion is heard. Adichie, a story teller from Africa, experiences this first hand when she moved to the United States and realized most people think all Africans come from broken homes and extreme poverty. Since this, she is has been more conscious of how easy it can be to only listen to one opinion of a certain place or thing. In “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie she wants to bring awareness to the audience that there are always two sides to every story. Adichie is successful in doing this because she uses Pathos and Logos in telling the audience her story.
A plethora of stereotypes are deeply embedded within our culture. There are labels that apply to sexes, those of different sexual orientations, separate economic classes, and those of a certain race or ethnicity. There are instances in which a person experiences stigmas for being one social characteristic, but there are also cases in which women are stereotyped not only for their sex, but also due to their race. Crenshaw contends that “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition ...
We all risk a critical misunderstanding when we signalize a certain group whether it is because of their culture of the stereotype they are put under. It seems to be the norm to put someone under a category, it is something we all tend to do even though it may not be our intention. In Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk The Dangers of a Single Story she explored the reality of a single story, she explains her upbringing in Nigeria and her move to the US. When she reached America while attending college, she discovered the average American single story of a person from Africa. She never categorized herself as anything different other than a girl that came from a middle class family. Not only did she suffer the degradation
Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping are important topics at the cause of debating within social psychology. A stereotype is a generalization about a group of people, in which certain traits cling to all members, regardless of actual individual variation (Akert, Aronson, & Wilson, 2010). As humans, people assign objects and individuals into categories to organize the environment. Individuals do this for not only organization, but also survival. Is stereotyping inevitable? That is the question; according to Devine (2007), it is, but Lepore and Brown (2007) have to disagree. Devine believes that “stereotyping is automatic, which makes it inevitable.” On the other hand, Lepore and Brown are not convinced that stereotyping is automatic, and have claimed, after observation, that it depends on the individual.
Throughout the world, people have always and will always judge each other based on their skin tone, their accent, their home country or other obvious features that we immediately see or hear about them. We often formulate our opinions of these people based on our first impressions of them. In 2009, Civil rights activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses her time on her Ted-Talk to deliver her resonating speech “The Danger of a Single Story.” During her world-renowned speech, Adichie discusses human relationships, how we, as humans, interact with one another and treat each other. Adichie establishes her argument with one powerful metaphor describing common stereotypes as ‘single stories’ to demonstrate how people are affected by being judged based
Stereotyping and prejudices can be spotted everywhere. They can be seen in advertisements, on television, in the newspaper, and on national news as well. The public gets its information from the media, so they put a lot of trust in the media to inform them properly. Not many people question the media’s motives or whether they are reporting the truth.
Chimamanda Adichie, a brilliant woman who grew up in Nigeria, shares her stories and thoughts on literature and how it’s presented. In this speech, Adichie perceives the “Danger of a Single Story” as a perspective on human beings, places and situations from a single narrative. She shares her ideas on what happens when we only get to hear one story at a particular situation. She shows that the problem with this is that when we see these single stories we are accepting one narratives truth as the entire truth. For example, she mentions how when she first came to the United States, her roommate already had a sense of pity for her, thinking that, “Africa was a single story of catastrophe, dying poverty and senseless wars”. With this being said,
According to the transcript “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Adichie believes that when a person looks at another group of people, that person assumes that the whole race is described by the one story he/she knows about. She gives examples of her life where she had encountered people that only knew the one story about where she is from and about Adichie herself only knowing one story as well. For instance, when her mother talked about a boy named Fibe, the only thing she knew was what her mother told her and that is Fibe is poor. So when she visited Fibe she was surprised that the family was able to create things, where she just thought that they were poor. Another Instance, was when she was in college, her roommate was very
At a young age, we begin to get subjected to different forms of propaganda as to how we should think or feel; we are subjected to these prefabricated stories and from these stories we begin to perceive life in the way the propaganda would have us think. We begin to tie real world events to what we have just seen in one of the many screens that we are subjected too constantly. We begin to have certain pictures as to how things ‘ought to be’ because we have seen them depicted so on television or films. We have these preconceived notions on certain things such as: “lumberjacks are big hairy men” or one of the more overly used ones: “the nail salon technicians is always Asian and they always talk shit on you while you get your nails done.” One
Most people find stereotypes to be obnoxious, especially when they have to do with sensitive subjects like gender or race. “Stereotyping is a generalization about a group or category of people that can have a powerful influence on how we perceive others and their communication behaviors” (Floyd, 61). Because they underestimate the differences among individuals in a group, stereotyping can lead to inaccurate and offensive perceptions of other people. Although stereotypes are prevalent in almost every society, becoming aware of our perceptions of others, as well as differentiating between both positive and negative stereotypes can help us overcome those stereotypes.
The situations caused from the constraints of society are a battle to be fought. The fight to overcome such obstacles, consists of a continuance of learning more perspectives to society and one finding their authentic self. With that comes peace and determination which inevitably shows through the acts used to help the community. Starting with finding out the whole story to any situation. By doing this, one is able to look outside of the perspective of one society, to avoid the conflict that comes with the cycle of social comfort. Adichie says, "To insist only on these negative stories, is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The problem with stereotypes are not that they are untrue, but that they
One of the most prevalent forms of invisible social control is the creation and perpetuation of stereotypes. Today’s society is filled with stereotypes and the media has proven to be an excellent breeding ground. Research in the stereotype domain indicates that the media can prime stereotypes, and these primed stereotypes do influence how people are later perceived. Also the research on media priming of stereotypes generally increases confidence in the generality of the media as a prime. Television, movies, newspapers and magazines contain millions of images that feature individuals portrayed in stereotypical ways. This paper will examine the February issue of Marie Claire and the gender and racial stereotypes that are evident within the advertisements and articles.