Have you ever heard a story and had a hunch there’s more to it? Your instinct is probably correct. You could be missing something crucial. When we only discuss one perspective, we are adding to the issue known as the “single story.” For example, Columbus Day celebrates Christopher Columbus as a hero who discovered the Americas. What actually happened was that the Indigenous people had already settled in the Americas. Now, it’s more appropriately known as Indigenous Peoples Day. You can’t discover something that’s already been discovered! This contributed to the spread of the “single story” because, for centuries, people have only heard one point of view on this holiday.
I watched a Ted Talk by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on what she called The Danger of a Single Story. Afterward, I talked to Monique Marshall, a 5th-grade Humanities teacher at Wildwood School, about her take on this concept.
I asked Monique if a “single story” is one perspective told without important contributions from others. How could this be dangerous?
Monique said, “For many of us we’ve been basically told one version of history or one perspective of the story of people. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is Nigerian, specifically talks about being a reader as a young person and only having heard stories that were not from her culture. And so, for me, what resonates is the danger of a “single story” is that there’s only one line of narrative, and we stop looking at multiple perspectives.”
Adichie talked about her love of reading. She had always enjoyed sitting down with a good book, but as she got older, she never saw herself in them. She only saw “blond girls with blue eyes.” She created this “single story” for herself: all books had to have these characters in them. When talking about this topic Adichie said “I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I did not personally identify.”
Monique makes a great point when she explains, “It’s not about bad and good necessarily. It’s just really about missing all the nuances. Different people experience things in different ways. If we can’t see the windows and mirrors in stories where we say - ‘Oh that’s just like me!’ Or we also see the windows… ‘wait, that’s unlike me’ - if we miss that, we really don’t have as rich a life.”
And never forget, “There is more than one version of a story - there’s more than one perspective.” as Monique told me.
In this day and age, we are constantly surrounded by fake news, politics, debates, and a worldwide pandemic that has created so much division. But don’t just take someone’s word as fact. Check your source, take a look at yourself, and dig deep - pass on the real story. Talk to your friends and family about this concept and make a change. Help to do your part. With this focus, our generation can make a change for the better.
“I’m excited about the future!”
Monique Marshall
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