Zoe Strepek

PCA 233

Bryan Furuness

23 October 2020

The Danger of A Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This TED talk is a lot different than just an author talking about a story he or she wrote

and going into detail about their writing and thought process. This is a discussion about how

influential stories can be on people, especially young people, and the importance of diversifying

our storytelling abilities. This writer uses her real life experiences, like when she went to college

and her roommate basically assumed she was incapable of anything, to show how dangerous it

can be to have one sided stories. Stories from only one culture, typically white westernized

culture. In life we create single stories, we create people, races, and ethnicities and define them

as one whole thing. Mexicans are immigrants, blacks are dangerous, Native americans are

uncontrollable. A lot of this stems from media coverage and literature.

She also talks a lot about how writers are supposed to have really difficult childhoods and

horrible stories from a young age that they incorporate into their writing. That wasn’t the case

here. We all have our share of bad stories, bad experiences, hard times. But those don’t define us.

Similar to how all of our good experiences and luck and wealth define us. When we just use

these single story perspectives, it continues to divide us instead of finding our similarities.

Our author wrote and published her first novel, and she still had all sorts of odd

experiences. People who loved it, people who didn’t like it and tried to fix it for her. She feels it
all goes back to the idea that she is black, from Nigeria, and she shouldn’t be able to read or

write stories so well.

The whole message of this TED talk from this author is the importance of diversifying

out stories. Not only actual stories and writing, but stories on the media, stories we tell within our

families and communities. We need to diversify our stories so people aren’t put in a box. So

while this TED talk didn’t focus on actual writing as much as I had hoped, it showed how

important writing, and accessible writing at that, is and how it can make an impact on people’s

lives.