Selena Truong ASTU 100A

Chimamanda Adichie’s TEDtalk, “The Danger of a Single Story” illuminates how telling one interpretation of a group of people over and over again contributes to the misunderstanding and generalization of a group of people. Adichie, an African woman, explains her experience of how the telling of the single story of African people from Western literature has created harmful stereotypes and has affected the way African people are treated and perceived in the world.

In this blog post, I will use Adichie’s concept of the danger of a single story and connect it to the issue of the misrepresentation of the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, specifically in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown Eastside in the early 2000’s in the media. Scholars, Yasmin Jiwani and MaryLynn Young, note that these women are portrayed through “hegemonic frame[s]”(903) to the public and essentially are only told through a “single story”. As Adichie states, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” (Adichie).

Adichie implies that telling a single story over and over again about a people creates a structured way of perceiving and interpreting them. This ultimately creates the stereotypes in which cause consequences a marginalized group. Based only on the detail that the missing and murdered women were sex-workers and that they may have had had drug addictions, they were homogenized and portrayed through hegemonic frames that created their identities to the public simply as “deserving of the mistreatment”, “junkies” and “worthless hookers”(Jiwani and Young 901-904). Through stereotyping and the telling of “incomplete” stories of their lives, sex workers are misjudged and ultimately stripped of the respect they deserve as people. As Adichie explained, if you “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, … that is what they become” (Adichie). The popular media has identified these women as objects in society that have no humane value.

However, Adichie also explains that “[p]ower is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” (Adichie). In the case of the murdered and missing Indigenous women, as Jiwani and Young reveal throughout the discussion in their article, the upper-class and the media have the power to portray the story of these women to the public (195-112). It is important to acknowledge the inequality of this power as it is the reason for why people of the upper-class such as celebrities who also suffer drug addiction are not portrayed through dehumanizing frames, but portrayed to the public as good people with amazing talents who are going through tough times or are “coping”. The power lies in the privileged class and it is because they have this power that they have the power to be recognized with diversity.

This is where the importance of life narratives comes in. Life narratives, such as the memoir of Sarah de Vries who was one of the murdered and missing women, give the opportunity for the voices of each and every victim to tell their unique story. Personalized stories of experience add to the single story that is told of a marginalized minority group and work to deconstruct stereotypes. For example, the author of Sarah de Vries’ memoir, Maggie de Vries, counters the stereotype of sex workers as victims and that sex-workers and addicts come from bad family backgrounds. Single storytelling makes it impossible to see the missing and murdered women as anything other than the stereotypes that devalue their existence as people. By telling the story of one sex-worker’s life and using Sarah’s own words in her journal entries, Maggie de Vries is humanizing sex-workers as a whole as she gives the chance for privileged and mainstream people to get to know these women personally for their personalities, feelings, hobbies, families and other humane qualities.

Adichie states that “many stories matter” and that even though “stories have been used to dispossess and to malign”, that they can also be used to “empower and humanize” (Adichie). With this said, it is important that as a community we look into the unique life narratives of these murdered and missing women in order to understand their situations and the structural issues such as racism and poverty that put them in these positions in the first place (Jiwani and Young 902). As a community, we should support and give power to the voices of marginalized groups and continue to challenge the power of mainstream media for the sake of making a change in the lives of these people.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Dangers of a Single Story.” TED . London. July 2009. YouTube. Web. 2 Nov. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/‌watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg>.

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing And Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality In News Discourse.” Canadian Journal Of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19     Nov. 2016.