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When you hear middle class you don't usually think struggle. I think the speaker told us she came from a "conventional middle-class family" because that is a dignifying single story about her. She also tells other "bad" single stories about herself. This shows the true power of a single story, it can make people think highly of you, it can make them think poorly of you and everything in-between. This makes me think about how the single-story is too powerful in our society.

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Analysis - When we first hear that someone is "poor" we tend to think that they are not anything else but that. We don't seem to realize that money doesn't define someone. Yes, poverty is a problem that people experience all around the world, but what we don't seem to understand is that money isn't the only attribute about someone. As the video goes on, she continues to explain how her mother and her went to Fide's home one day. His mother made a beautiful basket made from dyed raffia. She was shocked that his family was actually able to create things because she only had the single-story that we was a domestic help house boy, and the single-story from her mother that they were poor. She wasn't able to see him and his family as people who had the ability to create something, because of their money. 

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Analysis - When we first hear that someone is "poor" we tend to think that they are not anything else but that. We don't seem to realize that money doesn't define someone. Yes, poverty is a problem that people experience all around the world, but what we don't seem to understand is that money isn't the only attribute about someone. As the video goes on, she continues to explain how her mother and her went to Fide's home one day. His mother made a beautiful basket made from dyed raffia. She was shocked that his family was actually able to create things because she only had the single-story that we was a domestic help house boy, and the single-story from her mother that they were poor. She wasn't able to see him and his family as people who had the ability to create something, because of their money. 

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Most of the time when we think about someone by what we hear about them and not what we see of them, and when thoughts don't match you see you get shocked, just like when she first starts talk about when she came to america and roommate didn't think she was capable of using a stove, or that her English could be so good, not knowing it could be a official language there, or that she grew up like her, listening to music that's not tribe music, becasue of single story her roommate thought her to be a uncivilized and not anything like her.
and one last thing that because she from Africa everyone thought that means she know everything about it.

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when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me.

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Too many times the writer (as a 7 year old) gives off a vibe of a mistaken or uneducated writer who  is trying to learn as much as possible as she grows up. In terms of who could write and read stories she was uneducated, don't you think if she would have known that there were books in here culture she would have started with those books. but she then  realized it an older age that everybody writes. "Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. " She was getting educated on English subjects but in reality single stories began to appear in her life. Now was an adult she learn a number of things in america.

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POOR - we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.  

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POOR - we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.  

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"I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples"

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I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator.

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Too often a storyteller gives just one perspective, so it is important here when the speaker says she will tell the reader "a few personal stories". She provides multiple stories revealing a more complete view of her identity. I believe this is an example of using stories "to empower and humanize". The speaker tells stories to complete our understanding of how various stories together give a more complete picture of a person or place. Putting the good stories together with tales of challenges makes her relate-able and believable.

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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."

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"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. "

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"I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story."

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.