Novelist Chimamanda Adichie voices incredibly well in her TED talk about the danger of a single story. She explains the concept through ties of her own personal narrative and real-world examples such as the victim story America has created for Africa. Through her moving speech, Adichie does a great job of voicing the importance of sharing more than one story.
Within my Civic Issues posts, I would like to address the evolving topic of intersectional representation and how important it is to our societal commonplaces. In doing so, I also hope to advocate for many of the voices in our communities, both here at Penn State and broader within the world, to raise awareness for the stories we don’t hear most of the time.
The first story I would like to share involves our campus and the current issues we still face involving diversity and inclusion. The attached Washington Post article tells the story of Gary King, a biobehavioral health professor here at Penn State. Him and a group of other black professors got together to voice their concerns about the racism and discrimination they faced on campus. This seeped into all aspects of campus life involving recruitment, job security, academia, social events, and more.
The article states, “in 1998, records show, fewer than 3 of every 100 full-time faculty members identified, like him, as Black… the Black share of full-time faculty members on the flagship campus here has barely budged. It was 3.2 percent in 2019”. If that statistic doesn’t put things into perspective I’m not quite sure what will.
When the majority of people hear accusations like this, their immediate response is to be on the defense. However, President Eric J. Barron’s acknowledgment and acceptance of these accusations helped the community respond with more of an open mind.
I wanted to showcase this article as support for why a single story is dangerous because it conveys the point that if only one narrative is heard, other issues affecting different members of the same community may never be brought to the surface.
I’m sure a majority of the white members of the Penn State community did not realize the severe lack of diversity within the school and unfair treatment of the few black faculty members here. This does not necessarily mean they are ignorant or racist themselves, but most of the time we are not aware of problems that do not directly affect us.
This same lack of awareness can be applied to many other types of people, which is why I want to further stress how important it is to listen and uplift the narratives of others who are not necessarily the same as us but still have valid voices which need to be heard.
Link to TEDtalk: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
Link to article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/16/penn-state-black-faculty-racism/
Hi Ary! I have watched that specific TED talk multiple times and I love the message Chimamanda conveys. I really liked how you brought up issues that are occurring here at Penn State, because it makes it more relevant to us and shows how discrimination is still happening and in our community.
Weirdly enough, I watched this TED talk in my THON group a couple of days ago. I was moved by this talk, as Chimamanda discusses her perspective of being apart of a “single story” narrative. Single story narratives should have no place in society, as it never truly represents an entire country, population or ethnic group.