Page 14 - Reflections on the Danger of a Single Story

Last month, I sat down in the chair of the barber that hadn’t cut my hair before. After a quick explanation of how I’d like my hair cut, “Where are you from?” he asked in Spanish, smiling through the mirror. “Well, where is your family from?” “Dominican Republic,” I replied, bracing myself for the inevitable. “¡No puede ser! You could be anything—anything--but I never would have thought that.”
I think this scene best illustrates the single story stories that have stayed with me the longest--those that define Latino (read: Dominican- American) culture to other Latinos. Born from two Dominican immigrants, and raised in a mostly Latino section of the Bronx, I grew up constantly coming up against the concept of what a Dominican man should be like. What my priorities should be, where my interests should lie, what I should look like. This understanding came indirectly from my parents, but directly from my classmates and peers. And though the latter’s impressions were created from some distilled impression they’d received from their parents, their words are the ones that still echo around today. For the most part, I did not meet up to the standards of what a Latino boy should be like: I read, enjoyed school, was a bit socially-awkward and spent most of my time imagining things, even after I was at an age where my friends thought it was too childish. How ironic it was when I reached adulthood and realized that the tables would turn and that once I’d finally met other Latinos, and people of color, like me, that I’d then find that the rest of the world would not ascribe to me a single story of their perceptions of what I should be like as New York-born and Bronx raised man of color.
I wish that despite growing up with these experiences that I would have understood how complex people could be, and that I understood that people carried, and are many different stories. However, as Adichie says, it is hard to escape the onslaught of narratives we are bombarded with. While attending college I interacted with southerners for the first time in my life. I’d only ever heard stories of the South in relation to the Civil War, segregation, or random news stories. I had little conception of what they were like but had at some point accepted the idea that if you were from below Philadelphia that you likely were a bit behind in the times and unaware of what was happening in places like New York. Enter the woman who would become one of my best friends— Kay, a journalism major from Stone Mountain, Georgia. I realized quickly how much more cultured and exposed to the world Kay was than I and how much I had left to learn.
J. MIGUEL JIMENEZ