The Dangers of a Single Story

Looking at people around us everyday, we start to think about what their lives could be like. We make up stories about many people, from strangers to our closest friends and family. However, as we start to question the reality behind our assumptions, we find a whole new story that would have never come to mind. As Chimamanda Adichie stated a truth behind many stories, “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.”

A single story is not the whole story. A single story is based on misunderstandings. A single story is a lack of knowledge on others and making different assumptions. A single story is never a full story. Nonetheless, we tend to make stories about many people around us, be it the man with a beard that looks suspicious or that girl who has not fully covered her hair. Similarly to what Adichie has gone through regarding Fide’s family, as she said, “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” However, when she actually met them and realized they are much more than poor, they are capable of many things that she was unaware of. So, for example, that walking man could have gone through depression that he stopped taking care of himself and that girl’s cover could have just fallen because it was very windy. A single story creates nightmares and rumors about people. It creates stereotypes and a full misunderstanding of other peoples’ lives. To really understand these dangers, we must find a real life example that everyone has gone through, which is social media.

 

Social media has shaped our perspective of many things. A main example that Adichie has discussed is how Africa is viewed. Social media has made us think that Africa is “a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.” It is this place where people are starving with no food or water, which is far from the truth. In addition to the single story about Africa, social media has also created a major single story, which is being perfect. Going through social media and seeing other people’s posts and pictures, we imagine how perfect their lives are and how they can never feel any sadness, based on how perfect they are. These single stories not only affect us, yet they affect everyone associated with it. They create these categories that people have to follow, or they would be redeemed as bad and undeserving of any kindness.

As a person who has attended school where me and my siblings were the only Arabs and muslims within the school, it wasn’t a fun experience at first when everyone started to avoid communicating with us. The single story they had of us was terrifying, that some thought we were terrorists. However, I remember this teacher, that used to teach in Egypt, who kept talking about how normal Egyptians are. Only then were people more accepting of us and realized that there is nothing wrong with being Arab or muslim. And the day we left was heartbreaking for all of us, since we were able to make beautiful friendships that still last till this day. That teacher broke the single story, she completed an uncompleted story. Thus, Adichie really didn’t lie when she said, “That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”