My Single Story Analysis

Words: 668
Pages: 3

As a young, white, blonde haired girl, many people would ‘single story’ me as privileged, well-off, and a bit naive, and they’re be mostly right. I say mostly because I understand my own privilege—being from a white, upper-middle class family has allowed me to have opportunities that others outside of those boundaries wouldn’t have. But, they would be wrong by assuming my blonde hair and affinity for makeup and dresses equates to naivety or plain ignorance. These feminine traits have been viewed as inferior or stupid, coinciding with the stereotypical dumb sorority girl who adores pink and doesn’t understand basic math. My ‘single story’ is that because I am female and embrace that femininity, I am helpless. However, I am not free from relying on single-stories. I, myself, have fallen victim many times to the idea that femininity equates to stupidity and that any girl who likes the color pink is inherently dumb. Call it a teenage rebellion phase, but I longed to be different from the “other girls” and utilized internal …show more content…
As expressed within much of our reading, misinformation can create incorrect ideas of groups and their individuals within our heads, leading to these single stories. These ideas, while genuinely negative, can also perpetuate for the majority to be a sort of “protector” of the minority, which isn’t the case. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explained in her TedTalk “The Danger of a Single Story,” her white roommate had both her and the entirety of Africa pegged to the single story of being helpless, uneducated, and confined to a life where they could not make anything, just as Chimamanda had done previously to a house servant of hers, Fide. Through educating ourselves—either through personal experiences or merely reading educated sources—and getting a wide variety of information, rather than sticking to what we know or what others deem essential to telling