The TED Talk: The Danger Of A Single Story

As human beings, we tend to not understand that what we see or hear about social media, television, books, etc. can guide us towards this one piece of the puzzle. Not knowing the rest of the puzzle creates the assumption of a single story. In her TED talk, Chimamanda Adichie has spoken about the dangers of only knowing a story which leads to stereotyping. By this being said, to what extent do we as a society form a single story about others? To answer this question, there is a great extent when people create their single stories about others because we make these single stories without even realizing it. Chimamanda is a mere example, a representative of how our society thinks and is treated  when making a single

Lacking a wider variety of stories on any given topic can lead to dangerous misconceptions and casual racism. In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Ms. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award winning Nigerian novelist and public speaker, uses personal encounters with the effects of a single story to normalize her experiences with her audiences so that they may internalize them and act upon them easier. Ms. Adichie's use of pathos, as well as her comedic tone and understanding of who her audience is makes it significantly easier for her to accomplish the aforementioned goal.

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

In July 2009, at a TED conference, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author, gave a stunning speech about “the Danger of a Single Story”. In her speech, she mentioned about negative consequences happening when people tend to form stereotypes based on a single story, the one-sided argument. The single story blindfolds our eyes and prevents us from seeing the complexity, diversity, and similarities that construct our world, just as Adichie says “these negative stories is to flatten my experience and overlook the many other stories that formed me” (12:56). Listening to all her own personal experience and argument, I have become fully convinced and also see myself reflected in her stories. The single story can cause underlying and harmful impacts not only on personal issues but also on the global scale.

Stereotypes of people, places, or things leave a large gap between the truth and what is known as the truth. In the speech "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Adichie, Adichie explains the dangers and importance of single stories. The use of her past experiences as evidence to explain the damage these stories can cause, both to the listener and the person, place, and/or topic of the stories gives power to her speech. The author’s

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.

One of the most popular and watched TED talks appears to be Chimamanda Adichie’s, “The Danger of a Single Story”. After watching the TED talk, I now see what her argument is towards a single story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Her argument was clear and very true in our society. As a speaker, she is very articulate, calm, and organized. All stories matter and we shouldn’t just see one side of the story. Chimamanda tells her story on how she found her authentic cultural voice. She warns us that if we only hear a single story of a country or person we risk a critical misinterpretation.

In “Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent,” Safwat Saleem, shows his passion and his courageous side when speaking in his Ted Talk, describing the main idea of there not being such a thing of normalcy, as well as arguing that individuals should be confident and accept who they are from their special qualities. Agreeing with Saleem (2016), however to also consider it has become common in today’s society to want to be normal. Therefore many people would not agree with wanting to be exactly known as quote on quote ‘normal’ but they may want to assimilate to norms because that person is or may be in a unique way socially accepted.

When it comes to choice it always seems to be a love hate relationship: we hate making them, but we can’t live without them. Anyone can all look back to a time in our lives where they wish someone could just pick for us, or times when we wish there were more to choose from. All Americans have many choices, and it is such a part of our daily lives that we don’t even realize it. Barry Schwartz and Sheena Iyengar‘s TED talks bring up interesting ideas about choice, how people deal with them and their affects. They both state that although choice is good, it can also have negative effects. Schwartz explains what most people believe and experience with choice, while Iyengar shows cultural differences in choice making. Both Schwartz and Iyengar

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

In response to the speech ‘The danger of a single story” spoken by chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the key ideas that stood out for me in this speech was how society takes one persons actions of a particular group and base those actions on the behaviour of all of them. Assuming that based on the actions of one individual determines how supposedly everyone else should seem to act, clouding their judgement. The idea of society caught up in stereotypes and labels and the influence of power influencing people's decisions for example the government.

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.

In the speech, the Danger of a Single Story the writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells us the dangers of believing just one thing about a stereo type. In the speech Adichie repeats the phrase ‘single story’ as I think it is very important to her and by saying it repetitively she gets it to stick in peoples minds. I think the main point of the speech is to tell people the dangers of believing just one story about a country, a person or a religion etc. and to see past the stereotype we can be tricked into believing and instead see past it to see for example the person for who they are, for example, she as an eight year old girl believed a single story about their houseboy, Fide she says, ‘The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor... when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family. Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.’ This was her single story of Fide’s family, because all her mother had told her was that they were poor she did not see past that and had no idea that anyone poor was capable of creating something so beautiful.

The ted talk “The Linguistic Genius of Babies” by Kuhl (2010) tells about babies are genius on language learning, and shows some results of research as proof of this idea. The article “Learning a Language as an Adult” by Pakenham, McEntire, and Williams (2013) shows an idea about the “critical period hypothesis”, children during this period learn much better than people older than this age, especially in pronunciation, because their brain activities are different than adults during this time. Personally, I totally believe the idea of children younger learn better, because the scientific research and data are shown to audiences, and they are persuasive enough. And I do see proof in my life, like four of my Korean friends who came China around

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