During a 2009 TED talk titled “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian immigrant Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about her perception of the world as a child and how the world perceived her as she grew older. Adichie recalls her intellectual curiosity and how it drew her to literature. This curiosity resulted in her learning to read and write at an early age. The books she read were set in Britain and America, cultures far different from what she was accustomed to. The only information Adichie had about the West sat between two covers of a book. This constrained look gave her a stereotypical perspective of life in America. When she moved to the United States, the perception that the American people had of Nigerians surprised her. As she develops her contention, Adichie walks listeners through her childhood in Nigeria, her move to the United States, and how both offered her a unique perspective on how two vastly different cultures perceived each other. …show more content…
Staples compounds one example after the next as evidence of this discrimination. He argues that the perception other people have of him is premised on a negative view society has of young black men in general. In this case, people are using an incomplete story, what limited knowledge they have about a certain ethnicity, to actively judge people of that ethnicity. Applying Adichie’s idea of a “single story” to Staples’ essay helps the reader understand that the way in which we view others is predicated on the information we have about them; when that information is incomplete, uninformed opinions lead to inexact