Adichie, My Students and Failure of Imagination

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s video (The Danger of a Single Story) has been doing its rounds on the blogosphere for a while now. Since I was teaching a writing class last semester where the students needed to write an auto-ethnography for their final projects, I screened it for my class too. Most of my students are white, upper middle-class Texan kids. Very young, ie, 17-19 years of age. Not that the questions which Adichie raises in this speech ever lose their significance, but I think, what she does especially well is to re-think about the politics of stereotypes. A discussion on stereotypes, in my experience, often helps to initiate discussions of gender, race, class and imperialism inside the classroom settings.

What struck me about my students’ reactions was, when they began to comment, how quickly, almost all of them identified with the American roommate Adichie talks about. I am not blaming them, because I think that was an honest response. Save for a couple, my students were all American. So, I wasn’t surprised. And in their good-intentioned kind of ways, they were trying to think through hard questions like, What would my reactions have been like if Adichie was my roommate? What would I do now? How can one enter upon conversations without offending people who possess backgrounds vastly dissimilar from ours? And I recognize, these are all very difficult questions to grapple with. What is more, there isn’t any one definite answer. I would go even to that extent to say that I don’t think anyone ever ceases to struggle with these questions if one is serious and honest about the multi-layered implications of these interactions.

But what was fascinating (and scary) for me was the fact that none of my students made any efforts to process the fact that what it had meant for Adichie. Was she hurt? Did she feel embarrassed? Angry? Shocked? All of the above? In short, what surprised me was my students’ inability to imagine the implications of such realities and conversations upon the disadvantaged, the not-so-privileged, or plain and simple minority. Lack of empathy too, one can say. Although I don’t know the answers, I can’t help thinking, this is inextricably linked with the global production of a neo-liberal consent amongst the privileged youth. And I cannot help feeling concerned, worried and plain scared.