Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Solomon Lo
Mrs.Kelly
Honors English 9 Block 2
22 January 2016
Single Stories Cloud the Truth
“That movie really sucks; I hated it,” your friend says as you look at the movie trailer.
Taking his advice, you never give the movie a second thought and ignore what everyone else has
to say about it. However, a few months later, on a boring Sunday, you decide to go on Netflix
and somehow find that movie. Thinking to yourself, “I’ve got nothing to lose,” you decide to
watch it. After the first few minutes, you are instantly hooked. Surprised, you check the movie
reviews to find that it was rated at a solid five stars. Thinking about why you never watched it
earlier, you realise that you based everything off of what your friend said and didn’t pay
attention to what anyone else had to say about the movie. This caused you to miss out on an
awesome movie, because you never considered what other people thought about it. It is
important to have multiple stories about a people or place before making judgements because
you need multiple stories to find the complete story. Single stories are dangerous because they
can lead to misinformed decisions, carry the risk of being biased, and cause stereotyping. That’s
why we need multiple perspectives to help us understand the entire story, since they give
multiple points of view which helps us differentiate between bias and the common truth.
Single stories are dangerous because they lead to misinformed decisions. An example of
this is seen in the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who recruited people to join their cause to
overthrow the corrupt government and to establish a democracy. However, according to the
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YouTube video “Blood Diamond,” “They said they were fighting for democracy, but they fought
against civilians, and they used diamonds to fund the whole thing (Bangso).” The RUF recruited
boy soldiers by misinforming them about wanting to help the civilians. By only telling the
soldiers a single story, the RUF was able to make the boy soldiers loot and kill civilians to help
the RUF cause. The recruited soldiers were forced to accept it as true and made poor decisions
because the recruits didn’t have any other stories to compare the RUF’s story to. This shows how
a single story, such as the story the RUF told its recruits, is dangerous. These boy soldiers were
cruelly manipulated because of this, which is why we need to learn from their suffering and
listen to multiple stories. Without multiple perspectives, it’s impossible to verify information or
confirm facts.
Single stories carry the risk of being biased. It’s hard to know what parts of it are truly
neutral and unbiased, because there isn’t anything to compare it to. However, multiple
perspectives help us understand the entire story, because we can compare the perspectives with
one another, helping us find the common truth between them. An example of this is seen in an
article questioning Ishmael Beah’s credibility. According to this article published by The Slate
Group, “In addition, Lloyd explained in his emails that workers at the mine were telling him that
the book’s chronology was wrong: Rebels had taken over the mine in January 1995, not 1993 as
A Long Way Gone
Beah describes in (Sherman).” It is hard to tell what the bias is in this article
by reading it alone, because it’s impossible to tell whether a mine closing down really represents
the rebels coming into Beah’s village or not. While many people may believe this biased
information to be true, The Slate Group actually cleverly cherrypicked the facts, leaving out the
fact that the rebels may have occupied Mogbwemo, Beah’s village, without closing down the
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The Australian
mines. In fact, according to a rebuttal from Ishmael Beah, “ , presumably, is basing
their defamation of me on reports that the Sierra Rutile Mine was closed down by rebels in 1995.
But there were rebels in my region, my village, and my life in 1993. They attacked throughout
1993 and 1994 before closing down the mine(Beah).” This danger of a single story is shown in
this example because many people who have only read the The Slate Group’s article without
reading Ishmael Beah’s reply would simply accept the The Slate Group’s article as completely
correct, and think that Ishmael Beah was lying. This is because they didn’t realize they weren’t
getting the full story, since they didn’t have multiple perspectives to compare it to.
Single stories can cause stereotyping. An example of this is shown in
A Long Way Gone,
where, “Someone had started a rumor about the “seven boys,” us. Many times during our journey
we were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed us before they realized
that we were just children running away from the war....When we went to the river to wash our
faces, mothers would grab their children and run home (Beah 57).” Ishmael and his friends were
stereotyped because people had created false rumors about them being ruthless child soldiers,
while in reality, they were harmless boys who just needed help. Single stories distort the truth by
only giving one perspective. People only heard stories from people who were attacked by child
soldiers. Because of this, everyone assumed that boys traveling in groups were part of the RUF.
However, if they had heard stories from people who the boys helped, they wouldn’t have been so
biased and hurtful to Ishmael and his friends. This is seen all the time in real life. People are
often discriminated against because they have only heard the bad things about them. However, if
they heard multiple stories from different perspectives, they wouldn’t be so quick to discriminate
them.
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It is dangerous when you only listen to a single perspective because it makes you
vulnerable to misinformation, bias, and stereotyping. However, multiple perspectives help us
understand the entire story, because it gives multiple points of view which helps us differentiate
between bias and the common truth. It is important to consider multiple stories about a people or
place before making judgements because you need an abundance of information to find the
common truth in all the stories, which is essential for making informed decisions. Whether it
concerns a movie, person, place, or thing, we need to listen to multiple perspectives. Otherwise,
we might miss out!
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Works Cited
YouTube
Bangso, Bob. "BLOOD DIAMONDSThe True Story." . YouTube, 24 Dec. 2011.
Web. 27 Jan. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eThlmx7w9r0>.
Beah, Ishmael. <i>A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier</i>. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2007. Print.
GalleyCat
Hogan, Ron. "Ishmael Beah: “My Story Is All True”." . Galleycat, 22 Jan. 2008. Web.
27 Jan. 2016.
<http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/ishmaelbeahmystoryisalltrue/7415>.
Sherman, Gabriel. "The Feud over the Truthfulness of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone."
The
Fog of Memoir
. The Slate Group, 6 Mar. 2008. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.
<http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/03/the_fog_of_memoir.html>.