Story Lab: TED Talks

I watched these awesome TED talks about storytelling.  I really loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk about "the danger of a single story."  In this video, she tells of how she would write stories all the time as a kid and they were all like the ones she read about.  All her characters had white skin and blue eyes and ate apples and played in the snow.  She grew up in Nigeria and had not left her home country, yet.  So why were her stories so different from what was around her? Because she read English books and they were always the same story.  I grew up in a mostly white elementary school and then transferred to another district.  In this district, I made friends with a lot of first generation Americans.  I knew people in my classes from Myanmar, from China, from Venezuela, from Mexico, and from Nigeria.  When I first moved to this school, I was blown away by all of the people from all over and who looked so different from each other.  In my first school, I was stuck in a single story.  I love seeing the representation of other cultures become more common in media.  Crazy Rich Asians was an amazing movie for not only have a great story, but for its amazing representation.  It was something new.  Moana has helped the Disney princesses have even more diversity.  I hope the world continues to find new stories and strays further from this single story we've been stuck in.

Faces, flickr