This is sloppy, fast, but i feel powerful.
After watching the Ted Talk Titled, The danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her message can be applied to the city of Detroit. She crystalized an idea and message that i have been grappling at for some time now. I would like to call out the journalists who have entrenched themselves in the home that Time Magazine purchased this summer and ask them to look beyond the mayors office and national headlines for thier topics of interest. http://detroit.blogs.time.com/ What they have been assigned to do will have serious effects to the image of city, and if they do not do it well, the people who live here will be the ones to suffer.
Adichie says "The media can create a single story
show a people as one thing, only one thing over and over again.. and that is what they become."
I would also like to implore that Time magazine and any other media establishments recognize, and levy the talents of the documenters, journalists, and photographers that have been living and working to show an honest and raw portrait of life in this very misunderstood place, and have been doing so long before the fall of our auto companies became an international dilemma. Long before the the decay, urban prairies, independent venues, and local gardens became tourist destinations.
Once again Adichie says " It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power... to be greater then another... stories are defined by power, when, how, by who and how many stories are told. power is not the abality to just tell the story single of a person, but to make it the definative story.
The single story creates sterotypes... which are incomplete.
The single story robs people of dignity"
See her complete talk here...
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1 comment:
Thank you for posting this Vanessa. I am currently reading "The Great Turning" by David Korten which focuses precisely on the issue of stories in our culture and how these stories shape our consciousness and our psychological and spiritual relationships with the world around us.
Stories exercise a profound effect on human progress, or the lack thereof.Many of the stories that shape political ideologies, religion, and our perception of the world are vastly outdated. Social Darwinism, Christianity, the ideology of the righteous empire, humans dominion over the earth and its life forms are all based upon stories about human civilization that are over a hundred years old. People with a single story become the most vulnerable to rigid ideologies, which the past has shown to be the source of most of the harm that has come to humanity and to the earth in the past. Our world has countless other stories which often go untold which counter the stories of the past as we have gained a greater understanding of the world around us and the true depth and pragmatism of human nature. We need to tell those other stories and we need to have as many stories as possible, because no single story describes the incredible diversity of life on Earth. Only a variety of stories allows us to step outside of ourselves and perceive the bigger picture that is Earth Community.
I aslo hope that the Time Magazine reporters do the City of Detroit Justice in their reporting, as they may make or break the future of the City for which perception means everything at this vulnerable period in its history. Its time to bring attention to all of the untold stories of the City of Detroit: The stories of Hope, the Stories of new ideas, annd the stories of why things are the way they are and how they can change if people are willing to learn a new story.
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