Watched two videos today that I thought would be worth sharing.
In the first, author Chimamanda Adichie highlights the dangers of a single story. How the story of Africa that the Western world tells itself is one of poverty, endless war, and HIV-Aids. (like Singapore = chewing gum ban, extreme cleanliness, and caning that American kid)
She touches on the role of power in deciding how stories are told -
“It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power…stories too are defined by the principle of nkali (power) . 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 and 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.”
In the second video, Jon Stewart addresses a crowd of ~200,000 at the Rally to Restore Sanity, and though he doesn’t blame the tellers of the stories for the underlying problems the US faces, he urges the listeners to reject the notion of a single story. Adichie could have been channeling Stewart (or vice versa)
Stewart:
“We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is — on the brink of catastrophe — torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.
Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals. Most Americans live their lives that our just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often it’s something they do not want to do, but they do it. Impossible things get done every day that are only made possible by the little, reasonable compromises.”
Adichie:
“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. “
So here’s to working on listening better and more thoughtfully for the stories people tell about themselves and their businesses.
