Think of a time where you’ve told your friend or close confidant of a wrong that was done to you. You were overwhelmed with strong emotions that were the driving force in explaining in full length how terrible the person is that wronged you. It’s funny how we usually negate the other person’s side of the story, only presenting this concept of a single story. What if the person wronged in response to what you did to them? On a very minimial level, what if…..they were just having a terrible day? Although this is no excuse for someone to treat in a crappy way, it also shouldn’t be an excuse for you to defame someone’s character off of one low moment.

The dangers of a single story

The scenario above is a simple example of how the dangers of a single story may come about but there are much more detrimental ways in which the single story reinforces our biases. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explained an example about her college roommate who had predetermined that Chimamanda, being an immigrant from Africa, came from an impoverished background and had little to no knowledge of the English language. Her white college roommate who came from a middle-class background couldn’t fathom that Chimamanda, a Nigerian-born African woman, did not fall in either of these categories. Despite this example, Chimamanda admitttedly explained another scenario where she assumed the competency of the house boy who worked for her family due to the stories that were told of his family being gravely impoverished. These two examples in the video are cultural biases that make our society prone to many prejudices that have plagued us for many years.

When I reflect on my own experiences, I too have fallen prone to both sides of a single story, either someone assuming a singualar perspective on my babckground or vice versa. With this understanding of my experiences that I have seen to be one-sided from outside perspectives, as well as from my own, I see the many preeminent dangers within storytelling. In different forms of media, viewers of those mediums are often presented with the singular perspective from the creator’s point of view. This leads to the viewer adopting the creator’s perspective to draw a conclusion of their own about that piece of storytelling, without getting the multifacted perspective. As humans, it is easy to fall into this trap but I realize after watching Chimamanda’s amazing breakdown of the single story that we reinforce our biases by doing so. The storytellers that embrace and make a conscious effort to share a varied perspective are the ones who dismantle these biases, and I hope to be in that class as I journey through Hypercinema, here at ITP.