“Don 't Ask Where I 'm From, Ask Where I 'm a Local”
In the TED talk, Taiye Selasi attempts to march against the myth that we, as human beings, all come from a singular nation and therefore are deemed to be understood based on the vague and stereotyped concept of the nation. According to Selasi, countries are invented, they are not a fixed point in place in time, then how can it be considered as the basis for understanding a human being? What shapes our identities is not the country of our origins, but our culture, experiences, formed relationships, carried out rituals and restrictions. The three R’s: rituals, relationships, and restrictions are experiences we carry that speaks for where we are local.
What Taiye Selasi discusses in the TED talk is …show more content…
It is the misrepresentation of a culture and people of a specific nation by a single story. What we learn, as individuals, about people from various nations and cultures is from one perspective only, and less powerful the nation, the less complexity those stories have. For example, due to the inadequate and incomplete knowledge about Africans, Americans and many others view all Africans as poor, uneducated, helpless and powerless humans while the reality is far from that. Although the continent does become the object of truly horrific stories such as rape in Congo as Adichie states, but with the bad, there is always the good. Stories of people and cultures can never be told from a single perspective and thus we should not draw conclusions based on a single story. Because the American roommate of hers did not know better, she felt pity for Chimamanda from the beginning before she even met her just because she was an African. And as Chimamanda says herself, because of a single story, she also made a mistake to view Mexicans as “abject immigrants” portrayed by the
In the TED talk, Taiye Selasi attempts to march against the myth that we, as human beings, all come from a singular nation and therefore are deemed to be understood based on the vague and stereotyped concept of the nation. According to Selasi, countries are invented, they are not a fixed point in place in time, then how can it be considered as the basis for understanding a human being? What shapes our identities is not the country of our origins, but our culture, experiences, formed relationships, carried out rituals and restrictions. The three R’s: rituals, relationships, and restrictions are experiences we carry that speaks for where we are local.
What Taiye Selasi discusses in the TED talk is …show more content…
It is the misrepresentation of a culture and people of a specific nation by a single story. What we learn, as individuals, about people from various nations and cultures is from one perspective only, and less powerful the nation, the less complexity those stories have. For example, due to the inadequate and incomplete knowledge about Africans, Americans and many others view all Africans as poor, uneducated, helpless and powerless humans while the reality is far from that. Although the continent does become the object of truly horrific stories such as rape in Congo as Adichie states, but with the bad, there is always the good. Stories of people and cultures can never be told from a single perspective and thus we should not draw conclusions based on a single story. Because the American roommate of hers did not know better, she felt pity for Chimamanda from the beginning before she even met her just because she was an African. And as Chimamanda says herself, because of a single story, she also made a mistake to view Mexicans as “abject immigrants” portrayed by the