Analysis Of TED Talk, The Danger Of A Single Story

As a child, I had an insatiable curiosity and was always brimming with questions. Where did the dinosaurs go? Why is that man homeless? Where do babies come from? And my parents would always patiently listen and conjure up a quick and simple answer. Growing up I came to realize that some of these answers that my parents had given me weren 't always entirely correct or even necessarily true at all. But they would set a very important precedent in my life. What 's even more interesting; however, is that over the past few decades, society has undergone a similar phenomenon that 's not all that different from my childhood experience. Walk into a bookstore, and you 'll be greeted by rows upon rows of Sparknotes. Turn on the news, and trendy slogans and sound bites will fill the room. Don 't have an opinion, that 's ok, plenty of other people do and they 'd …show more content…
In her world-renowned TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie warns of the critical misunderstanding that comes with adopting a single story. "My American roommate was shocked by me," she recounts. "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. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. My roommate had a single story of Africa [where] 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." Her roommate adopted this view not so much because she wasn 't capable of grappling with the idea of a multi-faceted Africa but rather because doing so would have demanded an understanding, because it would have demanded effort, because it wouldn 't have been