Anthony Malaha Conversation #2

In the TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie she thoroughly goes through her life experiences in regards to “the single story”. Adichie speaks on life as a child, both her parents had good professions her mother being an administrator, and her father a professor so she was quite wealthy. When she was about the age of 8 she came across her first counter of what she calls a single story. Her family had a boy named Fide who worked around the house. Adichie’s mother would always bring up Fide when Adichie wouldn’t finish her food and bring up how poor Fide’s family was. One day when she enters Fide’s village, she notices that his family is much more than poor. Adichie continues to run into single stories throughout her life such as when she moves to the U.S. to go to university where one of her roommates and professor misunderstands everything about what it’s like to be Nigerian or even African in general.

I do agree with Adichie on how single stories are wrong and dangerous cause not everyone may react the same way or calmly to the single story you might have on that person’s people. But as time goes by, Adichie learns that the power of a single story is dictated by the person telling the story. A single story still has much relevance to the present day as we see every day on the news when politicians bash each other and try to twist and turn things that aren’t the complete truth. The most likely reason why Professor Barnes would assign this reading is to educate the class as a whole about the power of what words have not only on an individual but on a race or even society.