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You read two articles concerning “stories” about people

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You read two articles concerning “stories” about people. Both texts shared a unique perspective on what it means to have a “story” told about you, what those stories can get wrong, and who those stories can leave out. For this essay, I want you to consider the story that has been told about you. This might be you personally, a group you consider yourself apart of, your age, etc. The point is to consider what “story” you think people have about you in your mind. Then, I want you to consider what this story might be getting wrong, how it could be detrimental, or what it is leaving out. You can also consider what this story gets right about you and how it might be beneficial.

Your essay should include the following:

• Two pages double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt font
• An introduction that effectively introduces the topic and argument of the paper
• A clear thesis that addresses the prompt and drives the focus of the paper
• Use of both sources academically in your paper
• Clear body paragraphs that are each about their own claims
• A conclusion that wraps up your claims

The Danger of a Single Story Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #selfdiscovery #sharedvalues #reportinginformation #logos #pathos #ethos #global "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" by Howard County Library System is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" --- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. ____________________ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun,and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Her 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of A Single Story, is now one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The Story We Tell about Millennials — and Who We Leave Out Reniqua Allen #sharedvalues #generations #millennials #reportinginformation #finances #ethos #kairos Photo by unknown. CC 0 via pxhere. So on the surface, Troy is the kind of millennial that think pieces are made of. He's arrogant, self-centered and convinced that he is smarter than people give him credit for. His favorite topics of conversation are girls, sneakers and cars -- not a surprise for someone who was a teenager just a few years ago. But Troy's mannerisms -- they reveal the patterns of someone who is scared, troubled and unsure of the future. Now Troy also embodies the many positive qualities his generation is known for. An entrepreneurial spirit, an independent streak and a dedication to his parents. He believes in hard work and has tried gigs in both the licit and underground economies, but he hasn't had any luck and is just trying to find his way and still dances between both worlds. When I met Troy a few years ago, he had been employed as a golf caddy at a local country club, carrying bags for rich men and women who often never even acknowledged his existence. Before that, he sold sneakers on Facebook. He even tried selling candy bars and water bottles, but he wasn't making enough money to help his parents out or save up for a car any time soon. So Troy saw how hard his immigrant mother from Jamaica worked and how little she got back in return, and he vowed -- Troy vowed to take a different path. So he ended up selling drugs. And then he got caught, and right now, he's trying to figure out his next steps. In a country where money equals power, quick money, at least for a while, gives young men and women like him a sense of control over their lives, though he said he mainly did it because he wanted stability. "I wanted a good life," he told me. "I got greedy and I got caught." Yet the amazing thing about Troy is that he still believes in the American dream. He still believes that with hard work, despite being arrested, that he can move on up. Now, I don't know if Troy's dreams came true. He disappeared from the program for troubled youth that he was involved in and slipped through the cracks, but on that day that we spoke, I could tell that more than anything, Troy was happy that someone listened to his dreams and asked him about his future. So I think about Troy and his optimism when I think of the reality that so many young, black millennials face when it comes to realizing their dreams. I think about all the challenges that so many black millennials have to endure in a world that tells them they can be anything they want to be if they work hard, but actually doesn't sit down to listen to their dreams or hear stories about their struggle. And we really need to listen to this generation if we hope to have a healthy and civil society going forward, because millennials of color, they make up a fair chunk of the US and the world population. Now when we talk about millennials, a group that is often labeled as entitled, lazy, overeducated, noncommittal and narcissistic, the conversations often swirl around avocado toast, overpriced lattes and fancy jobs abroad -- you probably have heard all these things before. But millennials are not a monolith. Actress Lena Dunham may be the media's representation of this generation, but Troy and other voices like his are also part of the story. In fact, millennials are the largest and most diverse adult population in this country. 44 percent of all American millennials are nonwhite, but often, you wouldn't even know it at all. Now sure, there are similarities within this population born between 1981 and 1996. Perhaps many of us do love avocado toast and lattes -- I know I do, right? But there are also extreme differences, often between millennials of color and white millennials. In fact, all too often, it seems as though we're virtually living in different worlds. Now black millennials, a group that I have researched for a book I recently wrote, are the perfect example of the blind spot that we have when it comes to this group. For example, we have lower rates of homeownership, we have higher student debt, we get ID'd more at voter registration booths, we are incarcerated at higher rates ... we make less money, we have higher numbers of unemployment -- even when we do go to college, I should say -- and we get married at lower rates. And honestly, that's really just the beginning. Now, none of these struggles are particularly new, right? Young black people in America have been fighting, really fighting hard to get their stories told for centuries. After the Civil War in the 1800s, Reconstruction failed to deliver the equality that the end of slavery should have heralded, so young people moved to the North and the West to escape discriminatory Jim Crow policies. Then, as segregation raged in much of the country, young black people helped spearhead civil rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. After that, some people embraced black power and then became Black Panthers and then the next generation, they turned to hip-hop to make sure their voices were heard. And then Barack Obama, hopeful that he, too, may bring about change. And when that failed, when we realized we were still brutalized and battered, we had to let the world know that our lives still mattered. Now, when technology allows more video of our pain and struggle to be broadcast to the world, we wonder, like, what is next? Our country feels more polarized than ever, yet we are still being told to pull up our pants, be respectable, be less angry, smile more and work harder. Even the attitudes of millennials themselves are overdue for an update. Research done by the Washington Post in 2015 about this supposedly "woke" group found that 31 percent of white millennials think that blacks are lazier than whites, and 23 percent say they're not as intelligent. These are, like, surprising things to me, and shocking. And these responses are not that much different than generations in the past, and it shows that unfortunately, this generation is repeating the same old stereotypes and tropes of the past. Now, a study conducted by David Binder Research and MTV in 2014 -- it found that 84 percent of young millennials were taught by their families that everyone should be equal. This is a really great thing, a really positive step. But only 37 percent in that group actually talked about race with their families. So I could understand why things may be confusing to some. There are definitely black millennials who are succeeding. Marvel's "Black Panther," directed by black millennial Ryan Coogler and showcasing many others, broke all sorts of records. There's a crop of television shows by creatives like Donald Glover, Lena Waithe and Issa Rae. Beyoncé is, like, the queen, right? She is, like, everything. Young black authors are winning awards, Serena Williams is still dominating on the tennis court despite all her haters, and there's a crop of new politicians and activists running for office. So I don't want to, like, kill these moments of black joy that I too revel in, but I want to make it clear that these wins are too few and far between for a people that's been here for over 400 years. Like, that's insane, right? And most people still don't really understand the full picture, right? Our stories are still misunderstood, our bodies are still taken advantage of, and our voices? Our voices are silenced in a world that still shows little concern for our everyday struggles. So our stories need to be told in a multitude of ways by a range of voices talking about diverse and nuanced topics, and they really need to be listened to. And it is not just here in America, right? It's all around the world. Millennials make up 27 percent of the world's population. That's around two billion people. And with countries like India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, along with the United States, accounting for 50 percent of the world's millennials, it's clear that the white, often male, heterosexual narrative of the millennial is only telling half the story. Now, there's many people trying to broaden the palette. They're fighting to get their stories told and bust the millennial stereotype. Whether it's students in South Africa protesting statues of Cecil Rhodes, Michaela Coel making us laugh from the UK, or Uche Eze, who's framing views about Nigerian life, online. But I want to make it clear -- I want to make it really clear to everyone that just because things look more equal than they did in the 20th century, doesn't mean that things are equitable at all. It doesn't mean our experiences are equitable, and it certainly doesn't mean that a post-racial society, that thing that we talked about so much, ever became close to being a reality. I think of Joelle, a middle-class 20-something who did everything the "right way," but she couldn't go to her dream school, because it was simply too expensive. Or Jalessa, who knows she can't be mediocre at her job the same way that her white peers can. Or Trina, who knows that people judge her unconventional family choices in a different way than if she were a white woman. Or actor AB, who knows that the roles he takes and gets in Hollywood are different because of his skin color. And then there's Simon. So Simon, by all means, would be an example of someone who's made it. He's a CFO at a tech company in San Francisco, he has a degree from MIT and he's worked at some of the hottest tech companies in the world. But when I asked Simon if he had achieved the American dream, it took him a while to respond. While acknowledging that he had a really comfortable life, he admitted that under different circumstances, he might have chosen a different path. Simon really loves photography, but that was never a real option for him. "My parents weren't able to subsidize me through that sort of thing," Simon said. "Maybe that's something my children could do." So it's these kinds of stories -- the quieter, more subtle ones -- that reveal the often unique and untold stories of black millennials that show how even dreaming may differ between communities. So we really need to listen and hear the stories of this generation, now more than ever, as the baby boomers age and millennials come to prominence. We can talk all we want to about pickling businesses in Brooklyn or avocado toast, but leaving out the stories and the voices of black millennials, large swaths of the population -- it will only increase divisions. So stories of black millennials, brown millennials and all millennials of color really need to be told, and they also need to be listened to. We'd be a far better-off country and world. Thank you. ____________________ Reniqua Allen is a journalist who produces and writes for various outlets on issues of race, opportunity, politics and popular culture. She is the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America. This essay is a transcript of her TED Talk. The Story We Tell about Millennials — and Who We Leave Out by Reniqua Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.