Every single culture has stereotypes. The world tends to believe
that all Americans are fat, all Africans are poor, Asians are smart, Europeans
smoke, and people from South America live in trees. We have all been subject to
these "dangers of a single story", yet, just like Chimamanda Adichie,
we have believed some as well.
This past summer I participated in a 3 week course at Yale
University. There were 750 high school students on campus, and we were exposed
to many people from different ethnicities and nationalities. At the beginning,
when we were getting to know each other, many asked me where I was from. When I
answered "Colombia", most of them just gave me blank stares, while
others asked "That’s in Africa, right?". At first I was surprised and
even offended that many people did not know in what hemisphere Colombia was,
until I was faced with a similar situation. A foreigner girl asked me where I
was from and she identified Colombia straight away. However, when I asked her
where she was from and she answered "Bahrain" it was my turn to
stare.
We
often judge people based on what they don’t know, when, instead, we should
focus on everything we have yet to learn.
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