Beware the Danger of a Single Story

Over 10 years ago, I stumbled on a video online that has stuck with me ever since. A woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED Talk titled, “The Danger of a Single Story.”

As a highly educated Nigerian woman born into a middle class home, Ms. Adichie shared several stories in which she realized, as she came of age and traveled, that others assumed negative stereotypes about her as an African.

 People would react with surprise that she had not grown up poor, was widely read in literature, and spoke English well (unaware that English is the official language of Nigeria). The speaker went on to share examples of how she, too, succumbed to assumptions about other people based on few facts and sweeping generalizations. 

The author called this tendency to make assumptions about others based on limited information the “single story” we create about others, recognizing that there is a human impulse to see others in a narrow way that fails to allow for nuanced understanding and lacks recognition that individuals are complex and varied. The danger of creating a single story about another person is that it robs that person of dignity and hinders our recognition that they’re equally human, too.

Over the past many years, this idea of a “single story” has come to mind regularly as I’ve had to confront my own biases and stereotypes. And while the TED speaker highlighted the danger of a single story in relationship to ethnicity and people groups, the concept has helped me in my personal and professional life in other ways, too. Allow me to explain with an anecdote. 

In a meeting, a coworker once held up a small plant in a small planter box and asked us to tell her what we saw. A few people chimed in, describing the color and type of leaves as well as the color of the box. It was our “single story” about the item. She then flipped it, which revealed an engraving on the other side of the box as well as some variation in the leaves we couldn’t see from our side. We had been rather confident about what we saw and had no reason to suspect that the other side was any different. From my co-worker’s vantage point, her “single story” about the item would have been notably different from ours. 

This exercise prompted me to reflect on how easy it is for us to dig into to our own perspective and our narrow understanding of any given story, impatiently eager to convince others of how correct we are, with little tolerance or imagination that there might be more to the story than we understood, more complexity or nuance than we realized. And what is especially difficult is that we often aren’t entirely wrong. We do, in fact, know some things, perceive some things, and have some needed perspective. But we too frequently fail to recognize that there may be another side, and that the person with whom we have conflict may have accurate data and perspective that we simply cannot see. And so we have conflict, and suspect that the other lacks intelligence, or worse, assume they have malicious motives. And without intending to, we find ourselves slowly stripping the dignity of others in thoughts and words in our efforts to prove how right our “single story” is.

So, reader: “Beware the danger of a single story.” Whether this simple phrase reminds you to check your assumptions and stereotypes or reorients you to consider another side of an argument, I commend it to you if it helps you like it helps me. 

May we stay humble, oriented toward listening, committed to honoring and valuing others, and always eager to understand the whole story.