3.9: Example Essay- Reader Response

Example Essay

Chase Williams

Professor Williams

EG 101

15 Oct 2022

Coming to Terms with a Single Story

In her TedTalk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses the negative effects of oversimplifying a person or group of people. She uses a number of examples to show her point, explaining how a narrow view of the world through stories limited her worldview as a young child and how stereotypes have impacted Adichie as she has seen them applied to her and applied them to others. Adichie shows how having a single story about a place or a group of people can limit and skew a person’s worldview. Though it was hard for me to see Adichie’s point at first because of my own experiences, I can now see how telling a single story about a group of people or a place can lead to stereotypes, othering, and even discrimination. It is clear that having a narrow view of the world can be particularly harmful to children, but these stories can also lead adults to develop stereotypes that have serious effects on the world around them.

Adichie’s first shows the danger of sharing narrow views of the world with children. Growing up in Nigeria, Adichie loved to read, but all of her books were about white children in England; when Adichie began to write stories herself, they were all set in places with lots of rain and the characters were white with blue eyes. Adichie was representing the world that she saw in her books rather than the world around her. As Adichie got older, she began reading books by African women, and, as she notes, “I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized” (par. 4). Adichie notes that these books were hard to find, even in Nigeria, but books with characters that looked like her were important because they helped her see that she also had an important place in the world that deserved to be represented in books.

My experience was different from Adichie’s because I grew up as a white male in America. I am a part of the dominant group in my culture, so the stories that I read and watched on television all had lots of characters that looked like me. When I read Adichie’s story, I thought back to myself as a child: my favorite character was Batman. I watched Batman shows, read Batman books, and pretended to be Batman. When I began to write, I wrote my own comic books about Batman. However, because I was a part of the dominant group, Batman did not alienate me from myself. It was easy for me to see characters that looked like me all over television and books. The message this sends to white kids like myself is this: you are worthy; you belong. It was not until I read Adichie that I realized this is what people mean when they use the word “privilege.” Privilege does not mean that things are handed to you, but it does mean that you don’t have to fight to find characters that look like you or role models to look up to. The word “privilege” has become very loaded today, and the privilege of having most characters look like you might not seem like a big one, but this type of privilege is also synonymous with power.

A negative story about a person or group of people does not seem like a big deal at first, but Adichie shows the deep effects of these narrow stories. As Adichie finishes her TedTalk, she notes that, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” (par. 16). Adichie shares an example of encountering a single story as an adult that illustrates the power of a single story: she traveled to Mexico and was ashamed when the preconceptions she had about Mexico were proved incorrect by the people and country she encountered. Ever since the advent of media, people have been given single stories of places and people, and our brains want to draw conclusions about those places and groups based on these small snippets. Groups have taken advantage of this natural cognitive inclination and used it to build images of places and people that are damaging and oppressive: these single stories have real impacts. They keep people in poverty, in jail, and in oppressive countries where they have no route for escape. Looking at current events, we can see how a single story has been used to fuel the war against Ukraine by Russia; in only allowing one story about a place and a people to exist, Russia has justified and unjust war to its people. This is indeed the same tactic used by the Nazis. Those who have the power to tell a single story can shape the worldview of millions.

We live in a society where we do not always value stories. Instead the emphasis is so often on the sciences and technology. But telling stories matters too, as Adichie explains. How have single stories impacted you?