Megan Healy

Stretching Our Thinking

Stories can dispossess, but can also can humanize and repair.

  • January 24, 2022 at 11:45 AM
  • Visible to public
I watched the "Danger of the Single Story" Ted Talk. I thought it was interesting when she talked about how formative early reading is to early writing, and how even though Nigeria was hot, and she ate mangos, she wrote about the lovely weather and eating apples like in the American & British stories she read. I liked that she didn't bash these books, but instead explained how important it was to get African stories out as well, so people didn't only think of Africa as a single story of catastrophe. She said that the problem with stereotypes aren't that they're untrue, but that they're incomplete. Telling a single stereotypical story, like what frequently happens when people think or talk about Africa, dispossesses a people. We need to cast off our well-meaning pity and highlight the many stories of this continent, and all people groups.