The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a talk in 2009 entitled “The Danger of the Single Story.” She defined a “single story” as a narrow, one-dimensional story about a group of people or a place that is repeatedly presented as the definition of who they are. She said it is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. Stories are defined by how they are told, how often they are told, when they are told, and to whom they are told, factors defined by those in power. Power is not just the ability to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person.
Adichie quotes the Palestinian poet Maurid Barghauti, who says, “If you want to dispossess a people the simplest way 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 states and not with the colonial creation of the African state and you have a highly different story.”
I want to use those ideas as a starting place for a look at our current situation, but I want to first go back to 2009 and a segment of a piece I wrote at the time about the hijacking of a ship off the coast of Somalia.
I asked my university students what they knew of the hijacking and they responded that the ship was taken by pirates, that a brave American captain from nearby Vermont was being held hostage, and that he had given himself up to save his crew. I asked what they knew of these pirates and their talk came straight out of Disney; robbers on the high seas, peg legs, eye patches, hooks for hands, perched parrots. And they agreed that, with luck, pirates looked like Johnny Depp.
Then I asked my students if any of them wanted to join me to go hijack a ship. They looked at me somewhat blankly, knowing I couldn’t be serious, so I pushed some more. “C’mon, you can miss one soccer game; you can study on the drive. I’ve got a plan.” When they still sat silently, I asked them why they wouldn’t come with me. They gave the expected responses; it’s wrong, it’s stupid, it’s crazy, it’s illegal, we’d get thrown in jail. So why, I wondered, would a group of Somali teenagers, who were approximately their age, choose to give up their soccer games, and their parties to hijack a huge ship and hold its crew at gunpoint? Did that make any sense?
The great majority of us in the U.S., like my students, knew nothing of the context in which the hijacking and hostage taking were occurring, and the mainstream media offered no help. There was no mention of Somalia’s history, of the colonization and the looting of the country that had gone on for decades, of the wars and drought that had left the country in desperate straits. No mention of the dumping of nuclear waste into the waters off the Somali coast, ongoing since the Somali government virtually disappeared in the very early 1990s, or of the over-fishing of those same waters by countries from around the world that threatened the one resource Somalia still had. The hijacking was reduced to a single story, of pirates and the Americans who had fallen into their evil clutches.
I asked the students why we didn’t know this context, and they responded that it was nowhere in the news reports, and I asked them again if it made any sense that a group of teenagers would be out there hijacking ships when they themselves wouldn’t dream of doing so. The students noted that the news called them pirates, not teenagers, and that they hadn’t thought about it.
And what bothered me most was that we as a public didn’t ask why this was happening, did not wonder why these teenagers were doing what they were doing. We simply accepted what we were told without asking for more information.
Which brings me to more recent times, starting with the horror of the war in Gaza. As far as the news reports are concerned, these events began in October of 2023, with the attack by Hamas that resulted in more than a thousand deaths and hostage taking of Israelis. The stories about it are examples of starting with “secondly.” It leaves out the historical context that led to that October attack, and, despite literally years of “coverage,” most Americans know nothing of the deeper and more complex stories of that conflict that go back decades if not centuries. That history does not legitimize the horrific attack but does provide context, allowing us to have a chance of understanding why such an unimaginable thing could happen.
And to move even closer to home, we can look at the literal whitewashing of our own history being carried out by the current administration. They are removing achievements and actions taken by people of color, by women, by those who worked for change, by those whose stories don’t fit the single story that the administration wants you to hear. They are reducing the history told by our museums, schools, universities and the media, banning books, removing references to slavery in our national parks, and rewriting the history they want our children to learn.
How are our children going to learn their history, our real history, if the only story they experience is state mandated whitewashed texts and curricula? I want to suggest that there are steps we can take to help our students learn and practice, and that those steps begin with us, by our own practice in rejecting any single story, by modeling ways of not simply accepting what is fed to us, and recognizing that no one, no event can be defined by a single story.
Here is a series of questions that I suggest we bring to stories that we encounter, that will not only help us to become better informed ourselves but will model for our children the habits of critical researchers. Who is telling the story? Whose voice/point of view is present in the story and whose voices/points of view are absent? What evidence is offered to support the story? Is there any context provided for what is being described? Are there other stories, other accounts that shed a different light on the event in question? Does the story make sense? How can we find out more?
If we model bringing those questions to stories, our children might begin to practice such questioning themselves. If their teachers don’t simply accept the typical textbook account of an event (Columbus discovered America) but offer students the opportunity to practice critical questioning of their texts and stories in the news, our students will develop the skills that will enable them to reject the single story.
To reduce anyone or any group to a single story is to do them violence, to disrespect them, and it is a lie that does harm to our students by mis-educating them. We need to help them to hear the world’s many stories, so that they can learn who they are and why things are as they are.
Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000 and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017. He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at dougselwyn12@gmail.com.