LET’S BREAK SINGLE STORIES!
Welcome on the platform for Second Stories!
Stories about real people who normally don’t get to do the telling. This platform is here to give storytelling-power to people who feel that a Single Story wrongly represents them. Here you meet the humans that Single Stories usually hide behind stereotypes.
“[Single Stories] make one story become the only story. The problem of a Single Story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of equal humanity difficult, it emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).
A Single Story has the power to make us view a disabled person unable to love, be ambitious, heartbroken, sexual, well-read, or even happy. A Single Story can make us blind for anything except that single characteristic that a disability is.
A Single Story has the power to make us view a Black woman as strong only, discarding the fact that she can be in pain and in need of comfort. A Single Story can deny her humanity.
A Single Story has the power to make us view a person in poverty as unable to work, be creative, intelligent, sensible, active, and entrepreneurial. A Single Story can put a person into a trap of humiliating bureaucracies of control and belittlement.
“We need to tell different stories, to humanise the other”
(Elif Shafak)
Second Stories are all the other stories that add to the completeness and complexity of the person that a Single Story fails to describe.
A Second Story has the power to make us imagine a disabled person as our lover, as our boss, as somebody who feels lost, as our next president, as our teacher, or as the friend who will cheer us up.
A Second Story has the power to make us imagine a Black woman to be tired of fighting, in need of a hug, funny, heartbroken, easy-going, or full of love.
A Second Story has the power to make us imagine a person in poverty as they are trying, reliable, artistic, economical, trapped by bigger forces, or the next Albert Einstein.
When many Second Stories broaden our imagination, they can broaden opportunities for all of us, so that the next time we want to tell a story, we have the storytelling-power to make it a humane one.
We invite you to challenge the Single Stories that others have about you by telling your Second Stories. We invite you to reconsider the Single Stories that you have about others by listening to their Second Stories. It is in the advantage of all of us to broaden our perspectives and to know more than one story about each other.
Our Mission
Break Single Stories and turn them into Multi-Facetted Stories.
Our Vision
A society where we are curious about each other’s humanity; where we have the safe space to tell our Second Stories and the compassion to listen and learn, and to meet as intersectional individuals at eye-level.
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