Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Response to "Dangers of a Single Story"


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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