I chose to watch the Ted Talk The Danger of a Single Story. It resonated with me how many single stories I have encountered in my life and how many single stories I have seen others assume are true. Towards the middle of the talk she mentioned how single stories create stereotypes, and that these stereotypes and not necessarily untrue, but they are incomplete. When we take a single story and generalize it to a whole place, person or population it can be so easy to think that we know everything about that place, person or population. I like to think of the single story as a starting place for new learning. Knowing a single story is a starting point to having a better understanding, but it is not enough in learning about a place, person or population. At the end Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says that stories can be used to empower, humanize, and repair, but that stories can also be used to break. The more stories you expose yourself to, the more likely you have to humanize and empower, rather than break.
