One Dimensional People

The Tedtalk that we watched in class hit on many points about the easy habit of making people into single dimensional persons, effectively objects. The conception of this as a "single story" is very apt, and recently I have discovered that it plays out especially in my life as a student. In my major, many classes reduce people to a mass of similar individuals with predictable interests and give them simplistic stories in order to make modeling what "should" occur easy to compute. I've recognized recently that this kind of thinking has made itself more pervasive in my thinking than I realized. I had this discovery in my women's study class, when suddenly the gendering of development flipped everything I had been taught about development on its head. I had been always told the same story about developing countries: they need certain programs, they need money, they build industry, until my professor asked "What about the women?"

This question opened up the story of the developing world to me. The cultural norms, traditional division of labor, resource variation, and countless other aspects of the developing world that hardly get considered by the theorists telling me how to approach development contribute to the plethora of stories found in the developing world. Understanding that there is no single story calls for a lack of ignorance that comes along with respecting people for being unique, and not turning lives full of unique experience into statistics, another way that the single story is used to amass people into anonymous bundles. These may be different from the way that the single story was exemplified by the speaker Adichie, as believing to know one's history before learning it, but follows the same ethos of her story. I believe that anonymity is a large part of how the "single story" sustains itself. It is easy to subject an anonymous group to the single story that one chooses, but with names come the uniqueness of each person's history and story. Illuminating individuals' differences diffuses the power of the single story, and being interested in learning individuals' stories is the ultimate cure to the prejudice and assumption that comes from the single story.