Single Story Stereotypes

Stereotypes issue is that they don’t promote human equality. They highlight how different we are rather than how equal we are, but the real fact about this is that doesn’t matter what color of skin we have or which social status we belong to because we all came to life by birth and we are all going to leave by death.
In the speech “The danger of a single story” the Nigerian storyteller Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie is trying to demonstrate the audience that a single story cannot characterize a place or person because it creates stereotypes and racism.
Single stories have always characterized my life since I was a kid. I remember my parents telling me anecdotes about African children who were dying because of hunger, and that has always been my stereotype of a kid leaving in a poor place such as Africa. Growing up I realized that stereotypes are not necessarily true in fact nowadays media create stereotypes portraying humans as a “single story”.

In my opinion, a single story is what makes people judge before them knowing, they might have heard only one single and bad story about a person that they
already start thinking the worse about that individual, but they don’t know that it could be the only bad story about him, therefore a single story is never enough to portray someone or something. As the author said “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. ” I believe is true, in fact when I used to live in Italy I always had a different portrait to what I have now about Muslim people. Unfortunately, in Italy media portray Muslim populations as bad because of the many terrorist attacks that are happening in Europe, but living in UAE made me realize that they are humans exactly like us, they have values and follow strict rules because they are very attached to their religion.

Moreover, when I was a kid I always had a single image in my head of people leaving in Africa. I thought that everyone there was poor and as a consequence most of them were dying because they couldn’t afford food to live. This is the single story about Africa my parents always told me to not make me waste food, but growing up I realized that it was partly true. It is true that many people are dying but not only because of hunger, the main reasons why people in Africa are dying is because of the poor environmental conditions that leads them to get diseases such as malaria HIV and AIDS. Therefore, that single story made me create in my head a stereotype of African humans that was not completely real, “They make one story become the only story”.

Furthermore, as an Italian citizen I am perfectly aware of the fact that people create stereotypes about Italy and Italians based on single stories they have heard.
One bad stereotype people might have about Italians is that they are all involved with Mafia, which refers to organized crime groups, specially in the South of Italy, that corrupt politicians, do cocaine, heroin, military arms trafficking and more. It is true that Mafia exists in Italy, but not everyone is part of it and if you ask an Italian person if he is a “Mafioso”, he might even get offended. Besides, I know that there are also positive Italian stereotypes such as the fact that we only eat pasta, which is also partly true! We do eat pasta everyday, unless we have to lose weight, but we also eat proteins and all the other nutrients our body needs. Therefore, we can’t base our knowledge on one single
story.

In conclusion, the danger of single stories is that it creates stereotypes that affect the way of thinking of people. Through my life I had many experiences that made me have a single thought about certain people, but fortunately with time I understood that what I knew was just one side of the medal, and that there’s always a bad and a good side in every person.