The Danger Of A Single Story By Chimamanda Adichie

In the United States of America, the media has become the breeding grounds of extreme hypersensitivity to race. The media has caused a lot of racial tension in many ways, including spicing up stories that weren’t actually racist. Sometimes people spread the wrong facts through media so the actual story becomes distorted. Sometimes, books will use harsh words to create a long lasting effect on the reader. Authors will use their choice of words to strike a certain emotion in the reader to create a point, but some readers get so caught up in the word they lose the meaning. Today’s media has created extreme hypersensitivity to race in many ways including distorted stories and distorted understandings.

“Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born september 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria. She is a novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction writer who has published more than 15 novels. The novelist has also a myriad of awards such as Reader's Digest Author of the Year Award, MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this short story, “To My One Love”, the reader is given a setting on Nigeria in the 1990s where there has been an abundance of “Operations”, or robberies. At this time Chimamanda is in university and has taken a fancy to a young man named Nnamdi- unfortunately, he died because of these operations. Chimamanda wrote

Chimamanda Adichie is a novelist and a narrator who delivered a persuasive speech on what she calls; "The Danger of a Single Story" but in reality what it means is the danger of stereotyping. Dictionary.com defines Stereotype as “A generalization usually exaggerated or oversimplified and often offensive, that is used to describe or distinguish a group.” Adichie delivered her presentation on a very well-known website called Ted.com, with one objective in mind, to prevail upon everyone to share their personal stories with the world so that there no longer is a “single story” defining any one person or group. Although, Adichie is aware that the damage that has been already created may take some time to undo, she felt that

Stereotypes in our society are not uncommon. We come across them every day without realizing it. It is in our human nature to create expectations of the people around us, which could be based upon their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or other factors. Stereotypes help us categorize a vast group of people that we may not know anything about, to think that they are smaller and less intimidating. I believe that the blame for these cookie-cutter patterns can lead directly back to the media in every sense of the word. Media is all around us, and affects our opinions and ability to think for ourselves. Whether it’s the latest box office hit or the headlining news, we are getting assumptions from every point of view, which makes it

A single stories’ “power is the ability not to just tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” found in the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie tells of single stories she has witnessed against others and herself throughout her life, being from Nigeria, coming to a university in America, and traveling throughout her life. Brent Staples’ personal essay “Just Walk on By” provide examples from his own personal experience, of single stories that have been raised against him as an African-American male. Both express how believing in only things heard can demolish truths that have not yet been proven. Single stories may cause not only empowerment, but also a negative stigma to a person, group, or a place. There are many possible dangers that come along with a single story pertaining to the start or continuation of a story heard as well as the act of believing in it. Everyone has been in the same place as Adichie and Staples; been a victim or believed in the oppressors

My room-mate had a single story of Africa; a single story of catastrophe”. Adichie also tells how growing up in Nigeria reading only American and English children’s books made her deaf to her authentic voice. As a child, she wrote about such things as blue-eyed white children easting apples, thinking brown skin and mangos had no place in Literature. That changed as she discovered African writers.

The film Ethnic Notions examines the various caricatures of African Americans in popular culture and the consequences of these representations from the 1800s to the 1980s. The film showed how America went through a face of injustice for a period of time. The internet defines stereotype as qualities assigned to groups of people related to their race, nationality and sexual orientation, to name a few. (Kemick) Throughout American history, African Americans have been victims of stereotypes in many ways. White majority use violence caricatures, stereotypes, dominance, subordination and the media as ways to overpower African Americans.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Unfortunately, that day is not today. People are still being judged by the colour of their skin. Victims of stereotyping and discrimination are everywhere, as shown by Lisa Bird-Wilson and Steven Keewatin Sanderson. Stereotypes can be emotionally damaging, especially to Natives. Not only this, but they can also be physically harmful throughout the duration of one’s entire life. “Deedee” by Lisa Bird-Wilson and “Rising Above” by Steven Keewatin Sanderson both illustrate that Native stereotypes can be emotionally and physically harmful

Popular culture is defined as “a composite of all the values, ideas, symbols, material goods, processes, and understandings that arise from mass media” (Atkins 131). It is well-known to the public and reinforces the way people see they world, including aspects such as race, ethnicity, and gender. According to Omi, popular culture “deals with the symbolic realm of social life, the images which it creates, represents, and disseminates contribute to the overall racial climate” (540). The individuals or groups belong to a specific race can be perceived based on their behavior portrayed by the mass media, instead of being recognized for who they truly are. Such effect created by the popular culture contributes to what is known as “racial stereotype”, which is “beliefs about differences in behavior associated with racial differences” (Jones 982).

Watching the TED talk that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave on “The Danger of a Single Story” was powerful. A single story has insufficient primary sources to have the full comprehension of the real story. Seeing Adichie verbalize issues that I have discovered in myself allowed me to reflect deeply regarding my perception of others. Adichie spoke on how her childhood was filled with English stories and how she gained a perspective on their culture through books. Books are truly powerful storytellers and is often forgotten about in a society where books are taken for granite. A book in another one of my classes was based on Adichie’s idea of how English stories only told one side of the story; this book explored the lives an Igbo society and how English stories portrayed them differently than who they actually were. This proved that I am not alone in making a single story, furthermore

“Media stereotypes are inevitable, especially in the advertising, entertainment and news industries, which need as wide an audience as possible to quickly understand information. Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people—usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation.”

In her 2009 TED talks presentation,” The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how a single story presented by the media and books can affect the way a person may perceive others, places, and cultures (Adichie). She goes into details explaining her point through personal experiences where she falsely misunderstood someone based on a single word she heard numerously, and how she was a victim of a common stereotype. According to Adichie, there is never a single story and that people can go through a mental shift of their perspective if they considered various alternatives that differ from the same story that is commonly told.

People constantly try to gain direction and insight from their evaluations of other people. One such way they do so is through stereotypes. Stereotypes are cognitive constructs involving an individual’s half-truths and distorted realities knowledge, expectations, and beliefs about human groups. As such, racial stereotypes are constructed beliefs that all members of the same race share certain specific characteristics. In America, the media and Hollywood play an integral role in entrenching and dispelling these stereotypes. However, Hollywood and the media create characters according to stereotypes to attract an audience, from which the viewers can reflect on and laugh at the stereotypes recognizable within American society. This paper seeks to discuss the common stereotypes in American society and how the media and Hollywood promotes those stereotypes and their impacts.

From the TED Talk video “The Danger of a Single Story,” I think that the speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wanted to tell us that we need to read more and know different stories about one place because there are more than one story exist. We should not judge other without knowing themselves. Furthermore, she said that we should not easily believe everything we heard from media because they only give us one impression. I especially felt close to her when she described how she felt after she realized her American roommate teetered her as African not Nigerian. (4:13) Moreover, she had only a single story about Africa. (4:49) Those paragraph remind me when I was in college in New York, my American classmates did not know the differences between Japanese and Chinese or

Stereotypes have become a prevalent issue in our media. They, without our knowledge, prevent us from moving forward as human. In this essay, I will discuss the effects of stereotypes in media on gender roles, religion, and race.