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The Danger of A Single Story is a TED Talk by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, conducted during July 2009 on TEDGlobal. The lecture focuses on under-representation and the importance of sharing different stories and cultures. Since the original speech Adichie has continued to speak on the lecture's focus at events such as the 2019 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Symposium and Prize Ceremony.

Synopsis
During the lecture, Adichie said that the under-representation of cultural differences could be dangerous: "Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination and opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature."

Throughout the lecture, she used personal anecdotes to illustrate the importance of sharing different stories. She briefly talked about the houseboy that was working for her family whose name is Fide and said the only thing she knew about him was how poor his family was. However, when Adichie's family visited Fide's village, Fide's mother showed them a basket that Fide's brother had made, making her realize that she created her opinion about Fide based on only one story of him. Adichie said, "It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them." She also said that when leaving Nigeria to go to Drexel University, she encountered the effects of the under-representation of her own culture. Her American roommate was surprised that Adichie was fluent in English and that she did not listen to tribal music. She said of this: "My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals."

Adichie concluded the lecture by noting the significance of different stories in various cultures and the representation that they deserve. She advocated for a greater understanding of stories because people are complex, saying that by only understanding a single story, one misinterprets people, their backgrounds and their histories.

Publication
The Danger of A Single Story was first published as a lecture lasting 18 minutes and 34 seconds on TEDGlobal during July 2009. A Spanish language paperback book with an epilogue by Marina Garcés was later published during March 2018 through Barcelona : Literatura Random House.

Reception and analysis
David Brooks has favorably commented on the lecture, stating that it was "about what happens when complex human beings and situations are reduced to a single narrative: when Africans, for example, are treated solely as pitiable poor, starving victims with flies on their faces."

In a 2018 Scientific American article Evelyn Lamb drew comparisons between the TEDTalk and the stories of mathematicians, noting that there were many stereotypes associated with the public image of mathematicians, specifically that the average mathematician was seen as a socially awkward white male who "thinks about nothing other than his research, often to the detriment of practical tasks required for everyday living".