Danger of a Single Story Essay

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Reflection on “The Danger of a Single Story”
By Chimamanda Adichie

Why this all fuss about a “single story”? So what is a single story? Does this mean manipulation of ‘a single story’ by countless re-telling and thus creating an ‘entrenched’ view in our minds which we fail to challenge and investigate with a forward-looking vision?
No wonder, this leads to a lot of assumptions, half-truths and stereotypes when this story is passed on from one to another. For example a lot of people think that Australia is like the land of the kangaroos and there’s crocodile Dundee catching crocodiles in the Australian outback, but they do not acknowledge the cities, towns, suburbs, and the people who talk good English. These stories told by …show more content…
This can be blamed on western influence and western media, but none of the less we are suffering from the single story of Africa and Americans need to break free from it because it offends people and it’s not the right thing to do, and I found that interesting. Also in the book “Heart of darkness” by Joseph Conrad is an amazing piece of literature that brings a change in the readers view, shows us the struggle of the protagonist and it is one of the ways to escape from reality. The book focuses about racism, colonialism and civilization versus cruelty. This helps in teaching many cultures and different perspectives of people. This is a really good example showing that how literature can change the opinion and views of people. The false perception of her American roommate about Africa and African people was that they do not know how to use a stove, and listened to tribal music. For her the single story of Africa was uncivilized and strange.
She also mentioned about stereotypes and she acknowledged that sometimes stereotypes are true but however they are not balanced and are incomplete she said. That really reminded me about an incident in my Christianity class we had this debate about Colorism. Well Colorism is how people acted towards a group of racial class based on their lightness or darkness of their skin tone. The theory also specified that the lighter complexion would be granted more wealth, higher status and power in the society than the non-
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