Perspectives of Diversity and Culture

PERSPECTIVES OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURE.

I was able to talk with three different people:-

1.      My neighbor who is from another ethnic group. He said culture is the belief and ways of life of a particular set of people. It is their active lifestyle, whether they are aware of it or not, but it is their response to issues like marriage, burials, parenting styles etc and it shows in their food, housing, education and general look at life.

2.         I spoke to a senior friend who belongs to a dominant culture. 

She expressed culture to mean the way different people do their things, like where they live, the food they eat, their attitudes to children, old people and how they generally conduct their lives. She feels diversity is being different from one another. She gave example of the world being diverse in the sense that there are different peoples all over the world like the black, the white, the British, the French and the Black Americans.

3.      A family in the school program. He expressed that culture is the deep beliefs of people which shows up in their behaviour and responses to everything else around them. Culture is established through many years of relationship and practice that you grow up with. They looked at diversity as the difference that makes the world sweet. Imagine the world with only Josephs, and no Josephines. It will be a boring world.

I find that many people know little about culture until they are asked to say something about it. Culture is still being looked at from the surface level. The deep things like language, emotional issues, community relations and genealogy are rarely seen as part of culture.

In reviewing what we have learned so far in this course one of the main things that others mentioned in their definitions that was similar to what I have learnt is the fact that culture is a set of beliefs and a lifestyle of people and that culture can be defined through a set of acceptable behaviors within a group. 

For diversity, the similarity is in the fact that diversity is seen as a variety of different groups of people.

I think some of the things that we have learned that were omitted and possibly not considered were things such as the ways in which these acceptable behaviors allow us to perceive the world and others as unique individual, who can contribute positively to the world. 

Culture is how we behave; based on the experiences we have grown up with and can be transferred. My own definitions of culture and diversity were expanded because as I engaged with people for this discussion and my understanding from this course, I saw how deep culture is and how shallow many people think about what culture is. It is important to know that we all view culture differently and must be prepared to respect the views and opinions of others.