In the TED Talk “The Danger of A Single Story”, Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells her story of growing up as an African child and going the the USA to study. She shared a lot of experiences of “single stories”. Like when she assuming her domestic help’s whole family was nothing but poor, and how her American roommate thinks she only listen to tribe music. By presenting those examples, she emphasized the importance of not assuming everything just by one single narrow perspective but multiple angles.
I fully comprehend and acknowledge what she conveys. A person’s knowledge is very limited, and people tend to make assumptions about the things they don’t know very well based on the limited knowledge they have. The nature of avoiding complexity of human makes us considering people as one thing, one single story. Just like what she says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” And the consequence of viewing people from the single story is that “it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar”. At the end of the day, we are just humans, we are similar to each other more than we think we could be.