Inquiry Four The Danger of a Single Story. Literature & Language Essay

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Inquiry Four: The Danger of a Single Story
Imagine meeting an African woman for the first time and you initiated a conversation with her. Suddenly, you noticed that she can speak fluent English with a British accent. You got baffled and started describing African people as extremely poor, starving and illiterate. This problem of a single minded description of other people is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emphasized in her TED Talk titled "The Danger of a Single Story." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist and a storyteller. In her TED Talk, she discusses the effects of stories on how people construct their descriptions and understandings about different societies where single stories often reduce the complexities of human beings. This oversimplified set of beliefs about the personal characteristics of a particular group of people is called Stereotypes (Biernat and Crandall 1996).
In her talk, she explored the problems of stereotyping through the use of a single story. Adichie stated that, “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 (12:45 – 13:13).” Her statement depicts the usage of a single perception to indirectly measure the diverse dimensions of humans. If a single story was about all the negative things about one person or one aspect of a certain nation, then, the nation will be deemed as bad in general.
Adichie even experienced the single generalization of men in her nation because of one negative characteristic in her novel character when she met a university student one day. According to Adichie, “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel (10:40-10:50).” The university student showed grave ignorance about stereotypical remarks. The generalization looked at Nigerian men as physical abusers with contempt not even taking into account the characteristics of other men Nigeria.
Adichie retaliate the university student’s comment in mil...