The Danger Of A Single Story Essay

The danger of a single story is that they let the powerful downgrade the weaker because they create stereotypes, they can hurt the people, and no one gets represented from the culture.

According to Adichie, since the childhood, she was a victim of single story consequences. Her first false conception was caused by the children books, all of which is from American and Britain, filling up characters with totally different features, behaviors and “things which I could not personally identify” (1:43). This used to make she think that there would be no literature for the people like her. However, she got out of this perception when finding out other African authors and books. The second misconception is about Fide’s family when she turned eight. She knew nothing about Fide’s family except their poverty by keeping listening to the single story about them through

The following video The Danger of a Single story is an very interesting recording. First, when I looked at the title I thought it was going to be boring or about a women that is in danger but then when I start listening to the tape it became more exciting. The Danger of a Single story is very much related to the achievement gap across the world throughout different countries.

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

This Ted Talk served as a basis for all our essays. Chimamanda Adichie is an African writer who is from Nigeria, but studied in America. In this talk, there is a lot of information about, what she calls, the curse of a single story. This means that if you only have one story about a certain subject, then you have only a limited view of it. Adichie talks about how dangerous this can be, because you are perceiving something hat is most likely more complex and has more information to it, as something that is simple and has one view towards it. I used this to compare my main topic of gap years to. I used

My ideas and thoughts about Africa had been changed after I listened to Adichie’s speech. The way she described the danger of a single story was very inspiring to me, and I could relate many of the experiences I had to her story. I was born in Pakistan and moved to the U.S. in 2007. When I came to the U.S. I lived in Virginia and went to Freedom Hill Elementary School. On the first day of school I sat next to an Indian kid named Sai and he didn’t want to sit next to me he told the teacher that are countries didn’t like each other so he wanted to sit somewhere else, but are teacher said she didn’t want to hear any of it. So during the year we had to work on many things as partners, and we got along great we had many things in common and at the end of the year we became pretty good friends. At the beginning he probably heard some things about my country and he just assumed that I was the person he heard from those stories, and after meeting me he had a different understanding of it. Soon after the year ended my dad found a better job in California so we moved here. I lived in Alameda and went to wood middle. The school I went to was very diverse and this time I wasn’t the only Muslim

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

The danger of a single story – Rhetorical Analysis In her speech at Ted talks, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about how people tend to believe in a single story and describes how that this is usually not accurate. She talks about a lot of her personal facts and cites well-known sources to gain trust and credibility. She effectively appeals to the emotions of the audience by talking about her own individual experiences and using examples that relate to the audience. She starts the speech talking about her own experiences of believing in the single story, outlining how she had believed in a single story about books, and their houseboy.

“My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says during her TedTalk on “The Dangers of a Single Story.” There is more to the story, however, not all of Africa is in need yet from all the advertisements we see every day about them, as one thing repeatedly that is what they become. The popular movie “The Birth of a Nation” released in 1915 perpetuates this by exaggerating stereotypes of African Americans showing them as animalistic and drunks. Adichie warns us how media like Birth of a Nation affects the single story while the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee tells us how protagonist Scout learns to put herself in others’ shoes as she grows up. These all answer why the single story is so dangerous, it emphasizes how we are different rather than similar.

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.

After reading Tom Peters section about the impact of storytelling, I strongly agree with his perspective. Growing up I was always told stories about my family members; all of who came from India to America with little to no money in their pockets. Somehow, they managed to make a successful living in a foreign country. They had broken English so they struggled to communicate with people; they didn’t have smartphones that found places like restaurants or phone numbers. In present day I continue to hear stories about these experiences and they compared my life here. The impact of these personal experiences are that I am more motivated and driven to do better because of the struggle that my family faced.

Why is it a problem to have only a single story about a person or culture? Ms. Adichie said: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” A story of a person or culture is built from a lot of stories, therefore using only a single story to judge a person or culture is not enough, otherwise the whole idea about a person or culture is biased based on a single story.

The United States is a large country. It is a country made, by immigrants and individuals from a multitude of different nations and diverse ethnicities. The issue with the public in the United States is that we can be ignorant of the background of these diverse nations, and only view them by the little we have heard about them. Ignorance is the problem stated by Chimamnda Adichie in her Ted talk presentation on the “single story”. The “single story” is not made out of malice, but unawareness, the fact that individuals only see what is identifiable about a group of individuals and attribute it to the whole group. Chimamanda Adichie is African, and with her being African she received all the baggage that is attributed to Africans, whether it

As she speaks on her childhood, the issues of a single image also play a role. Adichie establishes credibility when addresses how she only saw the stereotypical blonde hair and blue-eyed characters in her books. Her idea of what existed around her was based on the images she saw as a child. She is well-aware of her status as an immigrant and educated women. She uses this in her work and relates both to her claim. As the voice of an immigrant she is able to recount her own traumatic experiences due to the beliefs others had about Africans. Her experiences make her relatable to anyone who has found themselves feeding into the single story. In one account she tells her audience the story of how one of her professors deemed her story unrealistic. Solely on the basis that the Africans in her story were not behaving like stereotypical Africans. In response to that Adichie states “I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not identify with” (Adichie, 1). This makes it easier for the reader to see how Western literature influences everyone despite of race or age.

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