Response to The Danger of a Single Story
In the video, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates single story with examples such as her impression to the house boy, her American roommate’s impression to African, and her impression to Mexico. All these impressions are single sided, with only one characteristic, which forms a seriously biased stereotype. The only story brings no benefits to both the stereotype holder and the one who lives in the single story.
Though not deeply explained, Adichie links the reason of single story to power. She argues that power has the ability to decide what to tell and how to tell, thus creating a single-sided story and making it to be the only story. I do agree that power can be an important factor for single stories, just as all those samples above involves a difference in powers, Adichie’s family owns power over the house boy and America owns power over Africa and Mexico. However, I do think that the word of “power” might be too vague as the factor of single stories. Time can be one reason of single stories, a story being told repeatedly over a long time could be convincible; lack of information can be one reason of single stories, one is exposed to nothing but a single piece of knowledge about another might just take it for granted.
But no matter is power, time, or lack of information, they are not easy to deal with, to avoid the single story. It might seem that information would be solvable, as Internet contains everything. It is true for big notions like Mexico, but when it comes to a person, or a small incident, we might just have no other information source but that single story.
Adichie promotes us to have “many story”, to break the danger of single story. This must be the first right solution for single story, but I think that we do not necessarily have the chance to gain “many story”. We are exposed to millions of news and information every day, there is no way for us to distinguish every piece whether it is single-sided and then try to find the other perspectives. I think the easier way to deal with the danger of single story, is to presume every piece of story I heard to be a single-sided one. Without further confirmation, I should not conclude the single characteristic or single reason to be the only one and the definitive one. If I hold the thought that every random story can be single-sided, then I would not spread them without confirmation, and I would not be reluctant to face other perspectives of the event when I met them. I shall be happy to know that I am no longer single sided, but maybe in a situation of “two story”.
Response to Trans Women and The Danger of a Single Story
In Cassie Blighter’s writing, besides other discussion towards gender, she points out that Adichie fell into the trap of single story. It seems very irony that the very person who illustrated the danger of single story failed to live up to it. Adichie took it for granted that trans women has better childhood experience than cis women as they once preceded the privilege of men. Adichie did not thought about trans women who were abused in their childhood for not being masculine, and all other suffers they experienced.
Adichie made one response based on the knowledge she had, however ignored that possibility that the knowledge is a single story. This behavior brought back to the previous point I mentioned, that if we assume the information might be single-sided at the first place, then we might not just jump to a conclusion so quickly without thinking about other possibilities.
Reference
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger Of A Single Story”. Ted.Com, 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en&subtitle=zh-cn.
Brighter, Cassie. “Trans Women And The Danger Of A Single Story — Where Chimamanda Got It Wrong”. Medium, 2018, https://medium.com/empowered-trans-woman/trans-women-and-the-danger-of-a-single-story-where-chimamanda-got-it-wrong-a6347d015d0b.