Blog Deep Dive Seven

Part One:

1. According to Adichie, the danger of a single story is that people will never know the other side of situation besides what they are told. For example, she didn't know that there were African books available because she always read English novels, and she didn't know that the family was capable of making something, only that they were poor. She states that these ideologies rob people of dignity.

2. She defines "nkali" as the concept of being greater than another person, something that is often the underlying influence of having a single story of someone or something. It turns a single story into a form of supremacy. She says that the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete, making one story become the only story.

3. The most important idea I took away from this Ted Talk is how much media can influence something and turn it into a single story. The way she spoke about her opinion of Mexico before she visited there really stuck with me, as I often had the same impression of it because the media I consumed regarding Mexico was so biased in that way, so I thought it was very intelligent of her to speak on it.

Part Two:

1. John Jones is a man in the story that did not grow up with much given to him at all, and once he gained an education, he began to learn of all of the wrongs and misdeeds against black people where he grew up. He becomes very angry, but is determined to use his anger to try and make good and educate more young black people about the horrible world, until his anger gets the best of him. John Henderson, on the other hand, begins his life with honor, as his father is the Judge of the town. His father is more forgiving and understanding of Black people than others, but still holds stereotypes and grudges against them. Henderson grows up playing with Jones, but they are eventually separated, and he becomes just as bigoted as the other write people in town. Despite his happy childhood with Jones, he is unjustly cruel to him and becomes the victim of Jones' anger.

2. I think he wrote this as a fictional story to draw upon the racial climate at the time and show that, while there are real life examples, the situation was so insane that it might as well have been fiction. I also think it might have made this idea that he wanted to spread be more widely available and appealing to people, rather than just a non-fiction story that perhaps white people were less inclined to read.

3. Education became the turning point in both his morale as well as his opinion of the world around him. I think his education truly helped him understand all of the terrible parts making up Jim Crow times that he might have not understood when he was younger. I think it also changed how he perceives his personal abilities, because he became much more reserved even though his world was opened up to education. I think education can definitely change a person. It changed Jones greatly, making him see the world in a different light than he previously had, and almost all of his opinions on life changed. 

4. I think both of these stories showed the danger of stereotypes and not seeing the full story of someone or something. Henderson never saw what Jones had to deal with, and though himself above him because of principle of the people he grew up with. This is much like how Adichie spoke about "nkali", the idea of being above another person. No one is ever above someone else, and no one ever know what another person has had to go through, and that is incredibly dangerous.

5. Jim Crow laws were the laws that legalized segregated practices in the southern United States. Almost every area was segregated, bathrooms, schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, jails, etc. Not only were black people at risk of arrest for going into areas only for white people, they were also not allowed to read the same books, vote, marry someone of the opposite race, or sometimes even speak to someone of the opposite race. This led to a long time period of unjust violence, oppression, and uprising that is still going on today.