“The Danger of a Single Story"

Adichie talks about how the media only explains one part of the story and most times the story isn't accurate and could lead to many different misunderstandings and unneeded casualties, these assumptions that are made cause people to generalize things that have a much deeper story and meaning. Adichie focuses on two personal examples of how people assume things and generalize things in her everyday life, she talks about when her college roommate thought anyone from Africa was poor and vulnerable and came from a struggled background, even though that's not always true and Adichie knows that because not long before she had mistakenly fallen for the one sided conception from the media and also assumed all Mexicans were “ immigrants”. This shows how it's wrong to believe the “ One sided story” being told by the media, that one sided story being told should never define a culture or a person. Adichie talks about how power has a huge effect on how loud a story could go, who tells the story, how the story is told, when the story is told, and how many people talk about the story, all this is power that is used to trick people into thinking that for example in Adichie's experience, in her trip to Mexico she realized that not all Mexicans are bad, druggies, and harmful. Adichie thought that Mexicans were harmful, bad, and druggies because that was the image American western media portrayed of them to the citizens of America. One of the first stories Adichie wrote was about white people playing in snow and not her talking about her life back in Africa because people like Adichie have a very limited amount of knowledge of the characters that appeared in literature because most influential western stories did not involve any foreigners whatsoever. Adichie explains how she was filled with joy and enlightened with “The discovery of African writers' ' which in her words ``saved her' ' from one sided books, one sided stories and saved her after being a victim of one sided biased literatures. To summarize the message Adichie wants people to understand is that if you tell a story, you should be telling the full story not only what you want to tell or what you want people to believe because if you keep hiding the truth over and over and at some point people will realize the exact same what Adichie realized.