The danger of a single story

Duration: Approx. 40-60 minutes

Introduction

Up to this point you have learned and worked out that you too are not free from unconscious prejudices and that these, combined with power, lead to discrimination. In this exercise we would like to work further with the aspect of power and recognize that we are both people who are discriminated against and who discriminate.

In this exercise we will work with the TED Talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who talks about the danger of a single story. The aim of this exercise is to begin to question deeply rooted knowledge and to fill it with new, much more critical perspectives of discrimina9on.

In the TED Talk, Adichie quotes a person who is using racist language (minute 6:23)

exercise

Watch TED Talk:
Reflective Questions about the TED Talk: When watching the TED Talk, what did you stumble over? What did you stumble over in your mind, caught yourself in? What would you like to think about further?
Which single stories do you know and can dismantle? What are the effects of single stories on the affected people, countries, religions, etc.?

Debriefing

Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out in her TED Talk: The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.
By using concrete examples, Adichie makes it clear that it is necessary to have a holistic view of people and not to reduce people to a particular characteristic such as culture, religion, etc. and to judge them according to these criteria. Our lives are several overlapping stories. In her talk, Adichie warns that we risk serious misunderstandings if we hear or know only one story about a person, a nation, a religion, … To sum it up briefly: it is dangerous, indeed deadly for humans, if we ignore the complexity of identities, of opportunities and circumstances.
To think about what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is saying, it provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s own prejudices and stereotypes towards others and on the prejudices and stereotypes of others towards us. It’s also about coming up with ideas to deal with it. It is not only a question of becoming aware of prejudices, but rather a question of dealing with attitudes and their positive transformation, with unequal power differentials and ideologies.
For a further and holistic discussion, it is necessary to focus on the aspect of one’s own position of power in society and the positions of power of the people with whom we live and work. The aim is to make us understand that our prejudices do not just stay in our minds but play a central role in our actions. This discussion should be conducted with special depth, but also with special caution — often feelings of shame and guilt arise (mostly in the case of people with multiple privileges) or feelings of powerlessness (mostly in the case of people with multiple discrimination).
Adichie shows that there are both sides in us: that of the discriminated person as well as that of the discriminating person. What maders is how we deal with the fact that we too discriminate. Let’s get started to shift from feeling ashamed to taking responsibility!

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