LP NKAMBULE

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LP NKAMBULE

REFLECTING ON STEREPTYPES

10 Mar 2024, 18:19 Publicly Viewable

In my opinion,stereotypes are a set of beliefs or thoughts about a certain group of people which are usually subjective and untrue. This blog serves to reflect on some of the stereotypes I lived by.  I am drawing ideas and summaries from Wainaina (2005) How to write about Africa,  Miner (1956) Body and Ritual Among the Nacirema, TEDTalks presented by Ngozi-The Danger of a Single Story and Bart Williams-Change your Channel. 

A single story is basically the one story that you believe about specific people.According to Ngozi, "creating a single story is about showing people as one thing , as only one thing over and over again and that is exactly what they become ". I believed that white people were rich.  That was my single story of white people and I couldn't associate white people with poverty and suffering hence I thought that as a black person I should strive to be like white people and have the same luxury of life they have. According to Ngozi, the single story results in stereotypes which are not only untrue but also incomplete.  I happened to have learnt that some white people suffer the same fate as black people and that we are all equal whether black or white.

I also learnt that I shouldn't associate Africa with poverty because we have a lot of valuable resources that make us rich. According to Williams, we are the richest continent in the whole world.  "6 out of 10 of the fastest growing economies are from Africa ". "Africa is the only continent you can love " (Wainaina, 2005).

My belief that our parents love us all has been contradicted by the statements from Nacirema.  "The Narirema believes parents bewitch their own children " (Miner,1956:506). How can a parent bewitch a child he /she loves? This creates differences in how different children perceive their parents.  Not all parents are loving and caring, some of them hurt their children.  Not all children have the same loving experience with parents as others so this creates stereotypes on whether parents are loving or not and as usual,people will have those kind of stereotypes depending on the experience they had with their parents but that doesn't mean all parents are unloving or loving.

In conclusion, I have leant that I should not focus on the single story because it blurs the other side of things.  The grass is not always greener on the other side. Not focusing on the single story helps us explore things from a different perspective and I learnt that before judging or stereotyping other groups I should look at things from their perspective and immerse myself within them so I can get a balance of beliefs and not only have one sided beliefs about a certain group of people.