Danger of a Single Story

       

The speech “Danger of a Single Story” is based off of how society judges each other. What the speaker was trying to say in that speech is that society creates a single story about them too quickly and without even getting to know them. When you create a single story about someone that you get so focused on that single story to remember that they are human too. For example, in the speech the speaker says “I come from a conventional,middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who was often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.” (“Danger of a Single Story”) That was the single story that she made about him. So later on in the speech she say, “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.” (“Danger of a Single Story”) Because of her single story about Fide and his family, she forgot that even though they were poor, they could still create beautiful, expensive looking things. Although we usually see single stories being created in the “real world”, we also watch them all the times in movies. For example, the movie Zootopia is about a female bunny who wanted to be a cop. Everyone told her that she couldn’t do it because she was a bunny. Their single story of her was that bunnies are too small and weak to ever be able to do something like be a cop. Another kind of single story that appears in the movie is that her partner in crime was a fox and no one would believe him because they think that all fox are sly, sneaky, and liars. That was their single story of him.  We have to realize that if we create a single story about somebody without getting to know them, we could possibly falsely accuse them and miss out on a great friendship because we created that single story about them. 

Trailer to Zootopia: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WWFB-zrxn7o