Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, who some of you will remember from her novel, Americana, which was the first year orientation book for 2015, is famous for her powerful TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story.” Adichie discusses the power of storytelling—and the necessity of multiple stories—in order to dispel stereotypes:
We’ve been reading articles, stories, and poems from the Harlem Renaissance that grapple with the racist stereotypes about African Americans that dominated print culture a century ago. I say “grapple,” because even when stereotypes are rejected, they may still haunt artistic portrayals. And even after stereotypes are complicated, resisted, or debunked, they may still endure in popular imaginations, both white and black. As Zora Neale Hurston’s play Color Struck shows, beauty stereotypes that privilege light skin can be internalized by black women like Emmaline, causing psychological destruction from within as well as social discrimination from without.
How far have we come in the last century in terms of dispelling stereotypes about people of color? Here’s an editorial by two college professors, Anthony S. Brown and Louis Harrison, talking about the danger of “a single story about black men” and offering some statistics that may surprise you into realizing how enduring stereotypes are and how easy it is to confuse them with reality.
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