Page 23 - Reflections on the Danger of a Single Story

Iadmire how Chimamand Ngozie Adichie expresses each element of her Single Story talk from a place of personal acknowledgment, which expertly allows all of us to get vulnerable with our reflections.
In the spirit of this kind of honesty, I’d like to start by sharing how I was raised in a well-crafted yet harmful and erasing “post-racial,” “I don't see color,” “Dr. King led the Civil Rights Movement and then equality happened” single story narrative of United States history.
This, of course, is not a single story about someone, but a foundational framework about “all people” that is super problematic because it ignores historical context and systemic processes that have quite literally established racial (and by proxy ethnic) inequality in this nation, which I believe is the US operational and relational framework for all systems of “othering” groups of people, including people migrating from other nations (many in the process of learning English language).
I would argue that my ahistorical and unethical “single story” framework for understanding the “progress” of this nation had a strong potential for being harmful when considering reality of students’ live experiences once I became a classroom teacher. Why? Many white educators enter the classroom with a confusing belief that “if equality had been achieved...” or “if I was successful in this equal system...” “....then all my students should be equally successful if they just did.....”. Or some version of the “this system worked for me so it should work for all people” narrative. There is little critical analysis of how the interlocking systems of oppression work to hold students back against their will.
White racial identity development in the USA, with this kind of “single story” miseducation, is not just ignored, it is literally erased. “Whiteness” did not exist where I went to school or in my home, and I was taught to not speak of race. My miseducated and oversimplified single story was that “all people have an equal opportunity to be successful” and that “work ethic” is the essential factor that leads to “success” in life. Being raced or generational systemic discrimination had nothing to do with it.
My mental shift toward a more complete understanding of my racial identity and the privileges and power that unnaturally come with being of german (long assimilated) and having white skin came once I relocted to New York City.
In New York City, my whiteness was presented to me on subway platforms, in education settings and via exchanges with friends. I could no longer see myself as “just a woman” because I found myself exhibiting aspects of whiteness, such as irrational fear of students talking about their daily lives in class (what if they talked about something i had no experience with? how would i maintain my ability to teach?)
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STEPHINA FISHER