Only then can we truly make change

‘I look forward very much to a time when magazines and newspapers will stop publishing a certain kind of photograph. A photograph of starving or sick children as a back drop. It is not only a cliche; you know the person usual famous, usually a westerner in the midst of hollow eyed starving children, but it is dehumanising to the children. Surely we can do acts of kind charity….. without making a fetish of our own moral goodness by taking photographs surrounded by starving children who have no say. Surely can help people by leaving them with their basic human dignity intact.’

Nigerian writer and Orange Prize-winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” – In this single sentence, Chimamanda Adichie sums up the danger of a “single story” such as all Africans being poor and corrupt and all Middle Eastern men being terrorists.

Through her own stories, Adichie invites us to explore our own stereotypes and assumptions, how we got them and, perhaps most importantly for journalists, how we perpetuate them.

She further challenges us to understand that power comes from not only having a complex story but having the rest of the world know that story. When we boil our understanding of a person or a people down to a single story, they lose the power of complex experience and we lose our ability to relate to them: we stop looking for the ways we are the same and rather see them as “the other”, someone for whom to simply feel pity or reverence. Yet when we tell the complete story, the multiple stories, we narrow the divide of difference and begin to see ourselves in each other–and only then can we truly make change.

Jena Olson