Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie, author of Americanah, one of The New York Times’s ten best books of the year, tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” Ted Talk in July 2009 describes the
detrimental effects that a single story may have. Adichie believes that single stories frequently arise from simple misconceptions or maybe even a lack of information about others. Stereotyping people, based on limited knowledge, can limit us from really “knowing” people.
This presentation really challenged me to consider my own perceptions, biases, and stereotypes. There are so many outside influences from the media and others around me. I reflected on what stories have I been told, how often were they told to me, who told those stories? I know that I am not just one thing. I am not just a woman. I am not just gay. I am not just an administrator. I am not just a wildlife rehabilitator. I am all of those things and more. Each of those parts of my life intercept and the experiences inform the next experiences. I am a firm believer that your past does not define you, yet I am guilty of categorizing and defining people based on a single story. Looking back, we can often see things or situations differently in retrospect.
What would people think of me if they knew more about my childhood, my upbringing and my culture. Would they recognize only a poor family or would they see an work-ethic that is second to none? I liked that Adichie addressed the concept and asked what may have been different if her roommate knew, or if she knew, or if others knew more of the stories that surrounded her childhood, upbringing, culture, and life as well as the lives of others in her community. I don’t believe that we do a good job being open to learning about other cultures, beliefs, thought processes, and life. Maybe it’s because we live in a fast-paced environment that demands constant thought and energy or maybe it’s because we think others don’t want to share, or perhaps because we are not open to learning.
Whatever the case may be, I definitely want to challenge myself moving forward. I don’t want to define others by a “single story” any more than I want to be defined by one. In my work, I have one very obvious personal example of making generalizations based on a single story. Somehow, I had developed a belief that if our mexican population had a difficult time speaking English then they probably had a difficulty with all literacy, reading and writing in spanish for example. When working with some of our mexican patients, using only verbal communication, a patient suddenly proclaimed to me, “Can’t you just write that down for us!?!”. What a terrible appumption I had made.
Adichie has a powerful summary. To make a single story, we must remind individuals of a thing, again and again, and then this is what they will become. She proclaims that denying a single-story concept enables us to return to a kind of heaven and see individuals as more than one unfinished concept.
