“The Danger of a Single Story”, the Ted Talk speech given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, explores the negatives of understanding something from just one perspective. She explains the danger of a single story as the “show of people as one thing, of only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become.” One of the biggest example she pulls up is the single story that exists in the literature. For instance, the story behind Africa always correlates with how poor they are and how they live in a struggle to escape poverty. Those stories are stereotypes that are incomplete and could be untrue.
After listening to the talk, I really agree with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I feel like sometimes we are too caught up in the way we suppose to think and behave because we are introduced to the single stories that are filled with stereotypes that were created. After I listened to her example of “African authenticity”, it seems a very controversial issue to judge whether something as authentic. Can we link authenticity to the stereotypes? Just because the stereotypes set it to be like that, doesn’t mean that it is actually like that. This, therefore, links to my opinion that a single story alludes us away from the true authenticity and more towards what it should be seen like, which is often misleading.
What I got from the speech is that we shouldn’t stick to any single story under all circumstances. This is because we are acknowledging things that maybe are not true and incomplete. At the end of her speech, she nicely concludes that if we “reject a single story, we will regain a kind of paradise”. I agree with her and will try to put myself in multiple stories that can ultimately let me understand everything better and not be caught in a single story.