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“Babe, can we talk,” he asked with a nervous tone. “My parents are racist,' my caucasian boyfriend Asher blurted out, sounding defeated and helpless. My heart made a sudden jolt and then quieted down in my chest as a crippling fear wrapped a tight grip around my throat leaving me unable to utter a single word.
Our nine-month relationship had been wonderful. He was funny, smart, and caring. We pushed each other to be better, his humor matched mine and what he lacked in social skills he made up for with his love of the outdoors and his ability to play four instruments.
He wrote me sweet songs and told me I had changed his world. I should have known better. I wish I had guessed that his wonderful traits were overcompensating to make up for his family's gross racial prejudice. I could feel hot tears rolling down my cheeks as I quickly looked away. As an African American woman this wasn’t the first time I had been told the color of my skin was a problem, but it hurt just the same to heart it again.
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I looked into his blue eyes, my expression clearly confused, dismayed and a bit suspicious. 'Trust me babe, I've already tried talking to them, but they are fixed in their ways. They grew up in a southern culture in another time,' he said. 'It was different when they were young.”
Asher was born and raised in Ashland, Kentucky, in a small town where everyone he knew was white.
All of his relatives were either from there or a similar neighboring town. Generation after generation of his family were married in that town and had either brown or dirty blonde hair with green or blue eyes. I had black hair, brown eyes and dark chocolate skin. Before Asher moved to California, where we first met, he had only known two Asians and four African Americans in his whole life.
My first mixed race relationship being with Asher, in our early stages of dating, I often worried that he was interested in me only because, to him, I was a rare sight, an African by race, ethnicity and nationality. He called me his Ethiopian gem and his comments about my physical features often triggered that fear, but over and over again I pushed it out of my mind. I didn’t want to think like that, I wanted to believe he was different, that he wasn’t with me because black is the new cool. He made me believe that he genuinely cared about me...all of me. That it didn't matter to him what other people said and thought about us. However, over time it became more and more difficult for him to hide the ugly truth so there came the revelation of his parents deep rooted racism.
I glanced over to see him staring at me with his sad and apologetic eyes. 'How bad are they?' I asked, trying to sound optimistic while brushing the tears off my cheeks. 'I mean there's the KKK and then there is my neighbor Mrs. Smith,” I said with a small laugh attempting to lighten the mood. 'They’re pretty bad,' he replied. 'They believe in the angry black woman and think that dating an African Ameican is downgrading. They think black females are sassy, irrational and uneducated. My mom literally told me that you might have a kid that I may not know about, and that you probably have an empty pocketbook as well.” He gave me a cute, but sheepish grin. My whole body trembled as I struggled with what to say next. But they've never even met me. They don't even know me, my voice cracked as tears brimmed in my eyes. Cruel words formed in my heart as I held back the urge to cry. How could they? What have I ever done to them?
Two weeks after our discussion, he and his family went on a church retreat where his well respected mother introduced him to every eligible purebred white girl at the event. When he came home from his adventure, he looked me in the eyes and said, 'babe I talked to my parents about us, they were dismissive, but they got the point. I care about you Ediyah and nothing they say will change that.' I reached out and grabbed his hand. Suddenly, I realized that what his parents thought about me had nothing to do with me personally, but had everything to do with the danger of knowing only one story about a group. His parents were like a little kid looking at the world through the eye of a needle.
In “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against the misunderstanding of others, pointing out how misrepresentation and stereotypes have dominated mainstream society for generations. She argues that in the power of stories there exists an inherent danger of knowing only one story about a certain group. The danger of a single story is that it creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. Stereotypes make one story become the only story.
Asher’s parents are a great example of people who believe in a single story about a certain group and act on that knowledge as the only truth about that group. From the moment Asher's mother learned of his attraction to African American women her single story about black women was made known to her son in the form of protecting him from that type of female. His mother's beliefs about black women were built on a popular stereotype known as the angry black women. The stereotype of the “angry black woman” has dominated society’s view of African American females. This stereotype characterizes these women as aggressive, ill tempered, illogical, overbearing, hostile, and ignorant without provocation. This single story is incomplete because it is not objective; it is often opinionated and biased, leading to loss of information and facts as well as bringing up certain false opinions. The consequences of this single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes their recognition of their equal humanity difficult.
Asher’s Mother's misunderstanding of me not only robbed me of my identity but also labeled me with a new one that assumed my character and was degreating in every way. Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk is valuable as a perspective in its own right, especially as she speaks with the perspective of someone whose identity often suffers from the stereotypes she describes in her video.
Misrepresentation of Race in Danger of a Single Story. (2024, Feb 15). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/misrepresentation-of-race-in-danger-of-a-single-story-essay
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