I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant.
I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power.
There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is nkali.
It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another."
Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly."