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Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie's The Danger Of A Single Story

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Stereotyping is a crucial tool towards human beings. People can be much attached to the idea of stereotypes, because they tend to gather and back up their stories from their own experiences. And people are all guilty for creating a single story, whether it’s on purpose or not. How would people see the world if there was no such thing as a “single story”? In her speech, “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie, is a writer from Nigeria, and she defines herself as a storyteller. She discusses in her speech how knowing a single story about a person, a place, or a culture it does not define it. Her speech gives a lot of information about the experiences she went through in her life; she talks about her life in Nigeria and how she had no idea that colored women …show more content…

Adichie then talks about how she was amazed by how little people knew about Nigeria when she moved to the United States. Her college roommate knew nothing about her or the culture that Chimamanda is from. Adichie explains to her audience how dangerous can a single story be, and what it can do to a person if only knowing a single story. In this essay I will be analyzing some of Adichie’s events in her speech, and those events are misjudgment, storytelling, and culture. First I’m going to talk about misjudgment. When an individual interacts with another individual, his/her judgment about that individual is based on his/her own experiences, and expectations. In other words, those individuals are imprinting their past experiences on the new person. Chimamanda Adichie was misjudged herself and misjudged others. Adichie talks about in her speech how she was misjudged by her college roommates. “She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language” (Adichie 04:01). Since Adichie came from

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Adichie also voices how the roommate was shocked that she could speak English, even though English is the official language in Nigeria. Adichie goes on to explain her roommate 's thoughts by stating, “My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals” (Adichie 86-87).

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