"Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story"

Here is another relevant Ted talk about the power of storytelling.  Chimamanda Adichie addresses the issue of stories showing people as "one thing" and her experiences as an immigrant.  Adichie recalls members of her family dying as refugees in Africa due to poverty and lack of health care.  Here are a couple of quotes from Adichie's talk:

• Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

• Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.