"The danger of a single story: Chimamanda Adichie"

This summer I attended a 3- week Summer Program at Columbia University. Surrounded by highly educated and global population of students I didn't expect them to underestimate my nationality as much. I went to a store with girls from my dorm and took out my Amex card to pay. One of them just kept staring at it and as soon we stepped out she took a hold of  my arm and asked with utter surprise, "Do you have American Express in Colombia?" I stared at her in disbelief and noticing my reaction she justified, "I thought it was called Colombian Express." At first I wanted to punch her in the face, but then I remembered that Colombia as well as the USA have their single story. 
As a start, for Americans they are the legitimate Americans. Each time someone introduced their nationality as "American" a small irritation would linger in my mind when I thought that being Colombian classified me as an America due to its geographical location. Americans think of Colombia as an extremely underdeveloped place where the only function id drug production. Based on this single story they would judge me and the rest of Colombian teenagers as a drug consumers. The truth is that neither me or most of the people I know have tried drugs. In contrast, most of the Americans I talked to had tried or used drugs in parties.
Single stories change perspective of others and lead to misjudgments. I too was mislead by a the single story of Americans' bad skills of dancing. I was surprised to see some of them salsa in Noche de Sabor. When this type of deceiving judgements occur, we should try to push away the irritation and share a different story that will in effect open a new perspective.