Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech of “The danger of a single story”, empathizes the amount of influence and power a single story carries. For example, at the beginning of her speech she shares her personal experience about reading American and British books as a child and how she was very easily influenced by them specifically having an affect on her writing. From the characters appearance to their values and behaviors all that Adichie had read, she applied to her own writing, it’s all she had known at the time until she discovered that there were books out there with characters that look like her. It makes us realize how we can be put in a small box on other’s reality with whatever limited information is given to us. Adichie also shares a personal experience with being a victim to the single story when she mentions a kid named “Fide” who used to clean her house. She came to believe that his family couldn’t do anything more then struggle in poverty, which led her to just feel pity for the boy until she realized him and his family’s story was much more then that of being poor. She has been judged by others based on the single stories heard about Africans such as believing she isn’t capable of speaking English and that all africans are starving in need of help. Her whole message is that it truly is dangerous the intake of a single story as we tend to judge a person or thing based on having heard even just one thing. with this limited mindset we are kept from reading all other pages of someones story, we are kept to a single page.
I can relate to Adichie’s experience on being stereotyped and judged by people because of her race. As a Mexican have encountered people who judged me based on my appearance they don’t believe I speak English and will instead speak to me in Spanish without having even asked me if I speak English. It gets me annoyed when they themselves speak in a broken Spanish accent so I’ll just respond in English to prove them wrong. It also connects with how Adichie once sassily confronted the student who believed all africans had husbands that beat them then she proceeded to made a reference to all Americans being serial killers.
