Growing up in P.G. County, Maryland, black is all I knew. My teachers were black, my doctors were black, and the cops were black. I’ve met people with hundreds of years of ancestry here, from Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, different shades, personalities, sizes, the whole nine yards. I have a broad perspective of black people, and my eyes are truly opened to how many stories reside in the black diaspora. However, I find that if you ask many black immigrants in America about African Americans, you will hear one single story: criminals, gangsters, scammers. People who are dangerous and uneducated. Even on the other side of the coin, many will say similar things about Africans: ugly, cheap, uneducated, and can barely speak English. Each culture has its stories, and despite being so similar, the black diaspora finds itself so split from one another. 

The stories seen online and perpetuated by the media have taken such a heavy toll on my community that groups that could look like siblings find themselves constantly at odds with one another. I remember one day I had gotten twists for the very first time; when I came home, my house was on fire. My parents looked at me with solemn disappointment and shame. The reitered over and over that I looked like “all those criminals out there”, and I wouldn’t get hired looking like this. The same hairstyles unique to us, that our own ancestors created and practiced for generations, were being watered down to a criminal identity. What a shame. The same story of violence and ineptitude that has long been used to describe black people is the same story ingrained in my immigrant parents. Despite living in P.G. County for years, despite the great African American people they may interact with so often, that same single story still prevails. What a shame. 

I find Chimamanda’s “The Danger of a Single Story” very relatable, because the perceptions that come from only believing a single story have ravaged my community, and I wonder whether or not one day we will open our eyes to read another.