Finding The Full Story
In today’s society, it seems that we’re more divided and polarized than ever.
There are many factors that cause this polarization but one major one is the single stories we make of others. A single story is the act of generalizing someone or a group of people without understanding the intricacies of their personality/culture, these assumptions are usually based off appearance or stories from others.
One week ago, we were properly introduced to this idea of the single story through videos like Chimamanda Adichie’s The danger of a single-story, and How to Stop Hating (Country Music) by Michael Wesch.
In Adichie’s video, she talks about the dangers of a single story and how the stereotypes and assumptions others make a one-dimensional view of a person/a group of people. She had also discussed her experiences with them, whether it was the time her roommate thought she couldn’t use household appliances because she was from Africa or when Adiche thought many people were unhappy in Mexico because of the news she saw of large number of Mexicans trying to immigrate to the US. Adiche also brings up how these single stories are dependent on power and says ‘Power is not the ability just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.’ A good comparison for this statement is Hitler’s rise to power. In Rick Steve’s video Hitler takes power, Andreas Clemons brings this point up by saying ‘He repeated a lie endlessly, and he didn’t make it a small lie; he’d make a big lie and he kept hammering it into their heads. He also dumbed it down as much as possible.’ Through these anti-Semitic lies, Hitler used this power to create a divide between the Jewish population and the rest of the German population. These experiences Adiche went through opened her mind up and helped her realize the damage these single stories cause.
In Michael Wesch’s video, he decides to step outside of his comfort zone as a city person and go back to his rural hometown to try and understand country music and why people like his sister like this music so much. Through this investigation he realized how he created this single story of the people who listen to country without really understanding it, and how this difference between his and his sister’s cultural capital put a barrier and created polarization between their two different worlds. During his reflection on this experience he had a really good piece of advice when he said ‘Love is not something that just happens to you, it’s something you do. It’s a practice, and you can get better at it.’ This shows us that if we really did take the time to understand each other, maybe we could put all these assumptions away and take down this barrier that divides us.
After watching all these videos, our class had conversations about Adiche’s and Wesch’s experiences and through these class conversations we learned about how our assumptions and these single stories we make about others can lead to stereotypes and how these stereotypes can lead to prejudice and discrimination that take us down this rabbit hole of polarization and divide, and how we create these single stories everyday whether that be a stranger on the street or someone on social media.
All these videos and class discussions had led us to our Instagram challenge assignment. In this assignment we were all tasked to talk to someone in the class we didn’t really know well and get to know a different side of them. For this project I was paired with Aubrey, someone I previously had never talked to. We had a very insightful conversation where I learnt
that she also struggles with procrastination, we are both more than willing to help our friends, and I even got advice from her for next year After this conversation we posted about our experience with the project on Instagram where I wrote about my first impressions on this project and things me and my partner had in common. This conversation really opened my mind and showed me the side of a fellow classmate I would have never known about if I never had this opportunity. I haven’t made assumptions or produced a single story about Aubrey, but I could have and that could have been the only story I’d know about her without knowing the other side of her.
Polarization is a major issue in our world today, Maryanne Wolf perfectly describes the effects of the single story in her article ‘Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound’ when she says ‘When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty.’ These single stories might be dividing most of our world, but through small steps like recognizing these single stories we create and hear like Adiche, taking our time to understand someone different from us like Wesch, or simply just sitting down and getting to know someone, maybe we’ll make some change. Sure this wont completely solve the problems that single stories plague this world with, but these small steps are required and it all starts with me. To quote Michael Wesch’s video ‘ Learning to love some musical genre you once hated is not going to solve the deep divides of our world, but its a start.’