The Danger of a Single Story

Resource: The Danger of a Single Story

For the past few weeks, I was reading the novel “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author with several works under her belt. I didn’t know who she was until I googled her, and realized that I had watched one of her TED talks a while ago: The Danger of a Single Story. I re-watched it yesterday, and it made me think about some things.

The takeaways from the TED talk: Stories are defined by who has power, including how they are told, when they are told, and how many times they are told. It is important to not reduce people, places, or things to a single story. This can lead to stereotypes, and while some aspects of stereotypes may have truth, they are incomplete and do not tell the whole story. People are multifaceted, and to insist on telling only the negative (or even only the positive) flattens an experience. The consequence of a single story robs people of dignity and often tends to emphasize difference rather than similarity. She touched on how novels are not representative of an entire culture, and how we need to broaden our perspective of cultures, ideas, people, etc.

I’ve been thinking about this in particular around police officers. Part of the current social justice movements are about seeing Black folks, and people of color, fully and not reducing them to a single story, which I feel personally invested in. However, I think in a lot of ways police are being reduced to a single story by a lot of people. And maybe not - maybe it is because they are treated as humans who can make mistakes with guns and get off the hook while regular folks are treated as stereotypes for similar offenses and receive punishment that the movement looks like what it does. It can be really easy to think of police as robots or to dehumanize them (mostly because they dehumanize other people), but I think we need to recognize and think about their humanity as we push against their practices and push for reforms. It’s hard for me to personally see the humanity in police as it seems like they are only looking to punish people rather than make their communities better (even in the suburban community I live in, I think about them mostly as people who could give me a traffic ticket), and I am making more of an effort to see them as people - I know that’s what I want as an educator/professional.

Thinking about police or education, it’s important to recognize that while some people may be problematic, really it’s systems that need to change. And it is people who uphold those systems, but I think there are good folks who perpetuate systems of oppression without knowing it (recognizing that there are also people who definitely know that they’re doing). Thinking about both policing and education, we really need to be clear on what their purpose is to define what they should look like (form follows function). I think most people would probably agree that the purpose of policing should be to protect people and keep communities of people safe, and that the purpose of education should be to prepare students to be critical thinkers to be able to solve problems in the world. However, in this country, both institutions started for very different purposes - policing for controlling minorities and education for preparing people to be workers in industrial society - and despite reforms, remnants of these purposes remain from the way that poorer neighborhoods are policed at higher rates than affluent ones to classes consisting of students sitting in rows listening only to lectures that prepare them for a standardized test.

Recently I have been reading more about the movement to defund the police (both sides of it), and I have a lot of notes that I need to start to synthesize, which I plan on doing in the next week or so. This topic is very complex and nuanced, and through learning, I am starting to form my own thoughts/opinions on it.