The danger of a single story
Chimamanda Adichie, is a Nigerian women that started
to read at the age of 4 American and English books. She also is an early
writter who wrote his first book at the age of 7 (This books were the oposite
to his life).
In this video Adichie speaks about the danger of a
single story. She says that the big problem from the stories is that this
creates stereotypes and changes the way of thinking of the person who read it.
The problem of the stereotypes is not that the information is wrong, the
problem is that they are incomplete. They makes that one story, becomes the
only story.
The single story shows you the people as only one
thing. For example: she believes that the stereotypes of a Mexican, was the
stereotype of an inmigrant person beacause she reads a story that said this.
The single story shows how different we are, rather than how similar we are.
Adichie says that his room mate at the university tod
her that she had heard a single story of Africa wich talks about catastrophes,
that Africans were totally different form Americans, and that Africans don´t
have feelings and no possibility with connection as human equals.
She realized that stories could be used to empower and
humanize, and when we reject the single story and we realize that there is
never a single story of any place we will enjoy a king of paradise.
For me the danger of a single story is that when you
read or see something about someone or something, you stay with only one idea
of someone or something and sometimes this stories didn´t say everything about
that person or thing, so we stay with an incomplete thinking of what the story
is talking about.
