"The Danger of a Single Story"

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity.

The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly. ”

That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.

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.