The Danger of a Single Story

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 I chose this chapter because I have heard of this phrase before but could not remember it's significance in detail. Soon after reading I recalled watching the ted talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. This chapter's title is alluding to Adichie and her theme that “The single story creates stereotypes... and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” 

It was so powerful to read Christensen's recount of what people would say to her based on the fact that she was a white woman teaching in a predominantly African-American school. As a white teacher in Providence, I can relate to Christensen. When in spaces with other white people, they comment on how I must feel so unsafe to teach where I do or that they can't believe that I teach mostly Hispanic students- how do I do it?? they ask. I never, for one moment, thought about sharing these horrible statements with my students of color. Yet I see the significance of it after reading Christensen, to teach the danger of a single story and perpetuating stereotypes if you do not work to dismantle them. 

In her chapter, she recounts teaching a lesson she designed on the danger of a single story. She starts the lesson with the essay “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Spaces.” This essay talks about the, still relevant, "unwieldy inheritance... to alter public space in ugly ways.” In 1986, the essayist, a black man, was seen as a threat rushing on his way to work. This exact racist assumption based on the danger of a single story, was the fate that took Trayvon Martin's life 30 years later. 

She then previewed Adichie's ted talk to her students. During the video, Christensen pauses and discusses her vignettes and how colonial education has made African lives invisible: Their art, their language, and their literature. I can't help but think how we STILL have work to do in Providence. While there is greater representation of African culture in the books we read in school, representation includes mostly slave stories such as in "Chains." A black, Dominican 10th grade student asked me this year- "why do we only read about slavery?" It was sad. I was so excited to teach (the only) culturally relevant poem this year, "Perijil." While it was culturally relevant for my Dominican and Haitian students, the poem was about the genocide of Haitian families by Dominican people. Problematic.





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