https://youtube/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg I discussed this to my class last Thursday. As a little a girl, I feel like I, too, was a victim to the dangers of a single story. I grew up in a household of books at every corner. Harry Potter, Maximum Ride, and the Princess Diaries series were some of my favorite books to read. All of these books contained white protagonists that explored and sought magic and adventure... I loved it. I never saw anything of it until we discussed this video in class. Come to think of it the only book Ive ever read about black people was about a predominantly black high school that involved a shooting and a lot of violence. It was riveting to read of people like me, but I think that was it. Besides a few books I read in high school, as a child Id barely ever read books about black people. And when I did, they were the same thing. So, naturally, I believed that black stories couldnt consist of anything else. They had to be about high school and a single mother or time on the streets or a hard-knock life. White stories could be all that and more. And when I started writing stories myself, I wrote white stories for white protagonists. The Presidents daughter couldnt be black! To quote Chimamanda Adichie, its not that stereotypes arent true, but they are incomplete. There is never a single story. When you show a people as one thing, that is all they become. I think that Adichie explained my situation as a child head-on. #umassworldlit2014
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 01:19:52 +0000
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