Stereotypes In Amanda Adiche's The Danger Of A Single Story

Amanda Adiche loved to read books and write stories as a younger child. Since there weren’t very many African books for her to read she instead read British and American books. This where she learned of British and American cultures. When she wrote she wrote of blonde hair, blue eyed people who liked to drink butter beer and talk about the sunny weather. Why would she write about them? Why did they have to blonde hair and blue eyed? That was all the characters were in her British and American books. In Nigeria they never talked about the weather, they ate mangoes, and she had never been outside the country so she never experienced snow (1:11). Amanda mentions, “That we are impressionable and vulnerable in the face of a story especially as

So why are we so apt to put a stereotype on a certain culture based upon a story? Just like Adiche mentions in The Danger of a Single Story, 12:56, stereotypes are not only untrue but they are also incomplete. When we hear a story about a certain culture we stick it in the back of our mind right? When that culture is brought up in a story or in the media, every story we have ever heard about that culture comes back in our memory. We compare stories and then come up with yet another judgement. It isn’t necessarily just culture that is affected either. It could be ethnicity, race, or even groups of people. Cops are a great example right now. A lot of people in our society have stereotyped cops as they are all bad and none of them do any good. How do our perceptions and their perceptions of us affect what we

We may not know a lot about them and I think that is why it is so hard for us to understand the differences. Different cultures worship a different way, they may cook dinner a different way, and the one I suspect is the hardest to accept is the language difference. Most people in the US only speak one language, English. Now the US is being taken over with many different cultures with many different languages. The top 6 languages spoken in the US are English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese. I know personally I get frustrated when someone is trying to speak to me and you can’t understand a word they are saying! Think of how frustrating it would be to be on the other end of that. You are trying to communicate with someone and they aren’t understanding you. They are coming into our cultures and into our way of living. You would feel the same way if you were to go to their country and talk English and nobody knows what you are saying. So why do we judge them? They probably would feel the same way we do about them. This is another thing that could put a road block in between the interpersonal and intercultural