Rhetorical Analysis Of The Danger Of A Single Story By Adichie

Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel in his formal speech,”The Perils of Indifference,” asserts that indifference has causes all tragedy in the past, present, and will continue to terrorize humanity in the future if we do not stop it. He develops his message through examples of what indifference specifically causes. Any wars or serious events like Kennedy’s assassination, WW I&II, etc. He describes these as “failures” that “cast” a “dark shadow” over “humanity” (par. 5). Also, Wiesel shares personal anecdotes in order to give his specific point of view at the scene of something like the Holocaust. His story with the “Muselmanner” illustrates that these prisoners were left to die in the corner of buildings and they eventually “stared vacantly into space” and they were “dead” but “they did not know it.” Ultimately, he ends with his prospects of the future. He hopes that humans abolish indifference for the sake of their own humanity. Wiesel’s purpose is to ultimately warn his audience into stopping the progression of indifference in order to stop the growth of foreign and domestic hostility. He establishes a serious tone for readers by using stylistic devices and rhetorical devices such as repetition, pathos, and rhetorical questions in order to develop his message that the inhumanity of indifference and the importance of resistance is still relevant today.

As seen through the speech, Elie Wiesel is a strong believer of individual experiences; however, his questions arise about people’s indifference once his audience has heard of Wiesel’s traumatic experience. Often time, Wiesel uses rhetorical questions as a way to emphasize and sir thought. When asking, “Does it mean that we have learned from our past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human?” (Paragraph 21). Elie Wiesel demonstrates a self evaluation on the audience. The intended purpose, indifference within people, is openly enforced through self evaluation.

In his essay “ In Defense of Prejudice”, Jonathan Rauch explores a much talked about topic in the United States today, prejudice. As his title implies, he is in defense of prejudice, he makes it clear that he is not a supporter of hate or racism, rather a supporter of “intellectual pluralism” “which permits the expression of various forms of bigotry and always will.” (pg 1). Rauch defends the right to express all forms of bigotry. By utilizing specific examples where prejudice is at center stage, Rauch tries to convince his readers that the solution to prevent prejudice is not attempting to eradicate it, rather he believes if we, as a society channel prejudice more effectively we can make it “socially productive.” Ranch defends his

Another rhetorical mode to which Roiphe’s essay belongs is comparison, a development of this comparison, and an organization of this comparison. First, comes the selection, which, in this case, is a comparison between an unhealthy and a healthy marriage that is perceived in Roiphe’s essay. “A man may choose a woman who doesn’t like kids just like his mother or who gambles away the family savings just like his mother” (Roiphe 551). This is clearly an unhealthy relationship that one chooses unconsciously. Another quote, too, shows an unhealthy marriage: “Sometimes people pretend that a new partner will solve the old problems” (Roiphe 553). But Roiphe also shows a healthy marriage by stating that “Some of one’s fantasies, some of one’s legitimate

A post racial society is one that does not place value judgments on ethnicity. The age old ethnic prejudices, discrimination, and overt racism that have been a staple of all societies, and have cause innumerable suffering vanish with the advancement to a post-racial society. Skepticism of the post-racial ideal arises in part due to colorblindness in society. Colorblindness plays a crucial part in post-racial society, and is necessary given the cultural diversity within races, as well as new scientific evidence discrediting the concept of race all together. In the Ted Talk “the dangers of a single story”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the ignorant assumptions that are made about individuals based solely on their racial background. Adichie

Story telling has always been an imperative part of cultures throughout history; recently in the last few decades there has been an incredible advance in social media and ingenuity that has made travel convenient and affordable; hence, enabled authors and journalist to travel and create cross cultural stories that spark interest in their readers. However, this advancement has its strengths and weaknesses given that it provides people with more opportunity to read a wider range of topics that reinforces or relinquishes the stereotypes believed about other cultures; this is the foundation of Chimamanda Adichie compelling speech that has a clear message throughout her speech on “The Danger of a Single Story”; furthermore, her presentation is filled with personal accounts that give her speech credibility; she does a tremendous job of not making her audience feel defensive, she uses humor to draw in her audience, and she has a powerful conclusion that ends with a challenge.

Have you ever seen someone and immediately thought how they are just by looking at them? Well, you should know to never judge a book by its cover because once you get to know them you realize they are completely different. For example in the video “Dangers of a Single Story” Chimamanda Adichie talks about a lot of her past experiences. She speaks about how when she saw or heard about people or their culture that she thought they were exactly what she heard, but when she met them her perspective changed on how she saw things because she realized they were the complete opposite; in other words she would stereotype people. She comes from a middle class family from Nigeria and when she was younger her mom brought a new houseboy. Her family told

Through their classroom involvement and meetings with people from diverse backgrounds who had shared experiences, the implications of injustice and what the Writers could do to change its prevalence became apparent. Ultimately, it is the choice to create dialogue and substantiate change one is advocating for that changes society. Centralizing people’s stories to engender understanding is central to justice in our world and community; alacrity is essential to promoting freedom and safety for people around the globe, or else malfeasance

Yet it is not simply judging a book by its cover: a single story creates and enforces stereotypes. Chimamanda Adichie is extremely familiar with the horrors of stereotyping but when newspapers began to characterize Mexicans in a negative light, limiting them only to their struggle for immigration, she was swayed to believe it. The extremely dangerous thing is the power imbalance concerning the media: news outlets, literature, cinema, and more are all controlled by people who have the privilege and opportunity to do so. They are unaware of the level of oppression of minorities and therefore if they attempt to portray it, their perspective is extremely askew. Because these people control what the masses learn, the public is extremely gullible and, as a result, the media has complete influence over the formation of opinions. In addition to the lack of proper depiction of minorities in the press, there is an absence of representation in the arts. When impressionable children grow up never seeing themselves portrayed in the books, movies, and television they watch, they begin to devalue themselves and believe that they are not being pictured because they are not worthy. Many children begin to regard the straight, white, thin, conventionally attractive people not only as the norm but as the ultimate goal, leading them to dislike the things about themselves that contradict. As a child, I was shown that every princess wanted a prince. Maybe one girl didn’t need a boyfriend, but she still wanted one (or at the very least, it was pleasant to have). I regarded this as a model for my life and tricked myself into believing I felt the same way, making it burdensome to differentiate between my own feelings and those that were the result of expectations I placed upon

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” Elie Wiesel’s words ring true today more than ever. Often times, people are regarded as abstractions due to simplicity, especially in today’s contemporary media: for most people imagining one’s self in the living conditions of a starving child in a developing country may prove emotionally painful; victims of a natural disaster or terrorist attack are pitied, but fail to receive one’s action; and empathy for a person miles away who has lost a loved one it may may be an inconvenience. In today’s society, change proves infeasible if people

Basically in this lesson we learned about how people of different ethnicities are treated compared to others. Ethnicities are groups people are labelled or put into. Marginalization is the false interpretation of a group of people that can lead to negative assumptions about that group. Inclusion is the action or state of being included within a group or structure. During this lesson we watch a video called the single story. In this video we learn about the dangers of the single story. It was sort of an inspirational video for me. The video taught me the meaning of the single story in the woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s perspective. Basically the single story is a misunderstood interpretation of a person or a group of people. In the video the speaker talks about a boy who used to clean her house back in Africa. She assumed that just because he was poor he couldn’t do anything with his. It wasn’t until the speaker went to his village to drop off supplies she saw art he made. She immediately asked herself “how can someone poor make something so beautiful”. Later on in the video Chimamanda talks about her college life. Her roommate had sympathy for her even though they had never met before. Her roommate assumed that she didn’t know anything about modern day things such as music and technology. For example her roommate assumed she didn’t know how to use a stove. The

The importance of listening to multiple stories is simple, without hearing more than on side, one can never be sure if the story is accurate. There are also various other ways that only hearing one story can be harmful. In Adichie’s talk, she stated many examples of how single stories can be harmful. The first being that it can create stereotypes. The definition of a stereotype is “A simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group.” With this, one can relate this to a single story by forming a “conception” and then form their belief on the topic of the story with that one point of view. The next being a result of creating a stereotype of the single story, this being the creation of the idea that that single story is the only story. Lastly, my favorite quote from the talk, “It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” I really connected with this quote and I think it brings the idea of the importance of hearing more than one story together perfectly. I interpret Adichie’s quote in this way, if we don’t let everyone have an equal chance of sharing their point of view, we are ignoring the fact that everyone sees a situation in a different way. Although, the last sentence of her quote connects on the idea of having different views and sharing them with each other makes

Adichie explains to us that when you accept one perspective one aspect of a group or place we can begin to adopt the story and let it become our vision of a people. What is astounding is her stories of herself and her roommate. they did not personally know the people that the story labeled as these incredibly simple people limited to the detail these stories provided. In reality they were so much more and it seemed impossible to me that a story could reduce a people to one image when people are always so much more, impossible to explain on a few sheets of paper.

“This is a time for a new narrative, a narrative in which we truly see those about whom we speak,” Adichie stated in her World Humanization speech. This quote stood out to me because she said that in her native language Igbo, which was the same as Chika’s in her story “A Private Experience”, the word love literally means to see. Adichie’s story and speech were similar in many of ways. They both demonstrated the importance of giving hope and the importance of being kind, or speaking kindly, to everyone especially those who are different than ourselves. In “A Private Experience”, Chika and the woman were both worried about finding their loved ones that they were separated from right before the riot. Chika and the woman gave each other hope by

The response from Ms. Elliott's class sheds light on the source of prejudice in our country as well as in others. Her class, within the span of 15 minutes,