After watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie video “The Danger of a Single Story,” and according to the way she used to deliver her idea, I realized that she was fearless and had a high-level knowledge. Adichie used her life experience and emotional examples to drive her audience to an idea of what happens when the same negative one-side story about a group of people or place gets repeated, and letting listeners with no knowledge of the story to create inadequate truths as a result. I used George Eliot’s quote “Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” because it explains the video’s contents and idea.
There is more to know about a person besides the single story that most people believe is true. A single story is something we hear about another person, culture, or where they are from. This can lead to critical misunderstanding of how their lives actually are. In the book, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. His writing makes sure that most of his characters don't fit into the group of having one single story this is how.
Today, the society’s lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping stories. A single story confines a corner of the world to a generalized stereotype. Chimamanda Adichie in TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, addresses that “if you hear a single story about a person or a country we risk a critical understanding.” Adichie also states, “a single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not what they are untrue, but they are incomplete.” Adichie believes everyone is guilty in creating single stories and they are dangerous because they rob people from their identities and dignity. Diversity of stories and possibilities are things that should be read and discussed. Single stories are dangerous because they make the differences in people stand out and the single story an incomplete description.
In today’s society many kids have live within a broken home. For instance the character Jared in The Accent by Ron Rash deals lies with parents that abuse drugs on a daily basis. Kids that live in a stressful environment tend to find themselves creating a fantasy world to escape his or her problems. On the other hand some kids may tend to find a physical place of sanctuary to cope with feelings of distress. Some kids develop distrusting thinking towards mankind which may cause many conflicts between them and society. Furthermore, it’s not healthy for any child to live in a mentally unstable environment.
In “The Power of a Story,” Nathan Alling Long had lost faith in everything when his dog, Gracie, ran away one afternoon. That day, he scoured the neighborhood for hours and put up signs, but she was gone. On day two, Nathan called his vet and the animal shelter to see if anyone had brought her in, but no luck. On day three, he checked the woods with his friend, Rhea, who said that maybe Gracie was on a great adventure. As a writer, it restored his faith in the power of a story as he remembered that he used to tell people Gracie was half wolf and half dog, which made it easier to believe she was out exploring her wolf side. On day four, he found a nickel which he believed to be a good omen for him and thought Gracie would be back the next day.
The film portrayed an important message and brought awareness to an issue that is normally overlooked. It also incorporated three different theories,Structural Functionalism, Conflict, and Symbolic Interactionist, and brought real life examples to them. Structural Functionalist showed not all theories can work effectively and that in some societies this hypothesis does not apply. Next, the Conflict theory displayed that no matter where you go, there are groups in society that will always be fighting against each other for a scarce item. Finally, the Symbolic Interactionist theory showed that all groups in societies work with one another and that experiences can change the way that reality is perceived and affect the choices that are made by these encounters. The video also implicated the science of sociology in the way that the information was presented and how the clip was laid out. This movie about a small town along the Appalachian mountains is so much more than just a video for entertainment. It is about helping bring awareness to a horrible situation and associating theories of sociology while doing
The famous Japanese proverb and image of the three wise monkeys “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” is interpreted in the Western world as a refusal to acknowledge the evil that occurs around us. In the autobiography, The Fourth of July, by Audre Lorde, she describes an event in her life in which she experienced racism. Lorde’s parents made sure their kids were sheltered from the racism going on in the world and kept them from seeing it. Audre Lorde encounters racism even though her parents tried to hide it from her, which shows how being sheltered from issues in the world can cause greater problems when they are faced.
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 Adichie’s TED talk, she tells how the “single story” is very dangerous thing. Adichie gets this across by telling her experiences receiving a “single story” by her mother. Adichie’s Mother had told her over many years that there was this boy that was coming to live with them. This little boy was part of a very poor family, Adichie’s mother had said to her, “ Eat the rest of your food, you know there are some people in this world just like the little boy that don’t have this food and are starving.” Now Adichie had always looked at this little boy being poor, when she had met this little boy he was able to make many things and seemed very happy and content with where he was in life. Now if this little boy looked at his own life the way that
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
In Adichie’s remarks, she explains the effects of single stories through forms of racism. While racism is a huge issue, I wanted to bring in a different example of when single stories were used in my life. These were connected with my religion and the religion of others.
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.
Slavery has played a strong role in African society from as early as prehistoric times, continuing to the modern era. Early slavery within Africa was a common practice in many societies, and was very central to the country’s economy. Beginning around the 7th century, two groups of non-African slave traders significantly altered the traditional African forms of slavery that had been practiced in the past. Native Africans were now being forced to leave the country to be used as slaves. The two major slave trades, trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic, became central to the organization of Africa and its societies until the modern era. Slavery and the slave trade strongly affected African society, and
Short stories can share themes, motifs, symbols, consequences, and plot lines, even if there is never any intention to share a common element between the stories. The stories can be written close together or in different decades and still be linked to the one another. They can also be worlds apart with different meanings in the end, but that does not stop them from having similar ideas expressed within them. The following three stories, “Lagoon” by Joseph Conrad, “The Rocking Horse Winner” by DH Lawrence, and “The Lady in the Looking Glass” by Virginia Woolf, are three totally different stories that share common threads that make them the stories that they are.
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