Coming from a small town community where there is only a single stoplight and everyone personally knows each other, diversity is not something that is experienced every day. Every year since kindergarten I have been going to school with the same group of friends who share the same socio-economic status as me and the only real diversity that the school has to offer is the one or two foreign exchange students that it is able to bring in for that year. Simply being put diversity is not present in everyday life for most of my classmates.
One day my eyes were open to the world and I finally saw diversity for the first time was when I went to work with my father, who is an elementary school teacher. My father works in the Lakeview School District
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I got up in the morning like it was going to like any other day for me. On the way to the school, we drove through the local neighborhood and that it self-was an eye opening experience. My whole entire life I have been surrounded by elegant houses, but here it was not the case. There I saw abandoned and foreclosed houses where families were living in remodeled military barracks in cramped conditions with multiple families in a single house. When we finally arrived at the school and walked through the reinforced metal doors used to prevent break ins from occurring. It was what was inside of those doors that changed my outlook on society for the rest of my life. Inside I saw different races and ethnicities of students waiting to start their school day. On the contrary, to common belief, there were Caucasians, African-Americans, and Mexicans mingling altogether without any segregation. To the kids, race and ethnicity did not matter to they all viewed each other as equal and more importantly as friends. As the day went on I got to personally know a couple of students and a common thing came up and it was school. For the kid's school was their escape from poverty and domestic issues and while at school race and ethnicity never crosses their minds they do not see each white or black they see each other as classmates and
Growing up in a small town I did not deal with much diversity. Out of a school of one-thousand kids we only had twelve black students and three hispanic students. The school is virtually homogenous. I was shocked to see how the world's attitude towards diversity differed from my narrominded town.
How do people behave? What makes us act the way we do? There are as many different answers as there are people. Each person is a unique makeup of individual characteristics which blend together to form the personality, the behavior of the person. We can identify certain broad characteristics of groups of people and apply them to individuals to get an idea of how they will behave in a given situation. This is called stereotyping and, when taken too far, will give a distorted picture of what to expect of a persons behavior. While you can never get a fully accurate picture of how someone will behave based on their demographics and characteristics, you can make certain general guesses that will point
Our lives are shaped by who we are, what we are, and where we come from. The different opportunities and life chances do matter in U.S. society in many ways. Research shows that someone's race, ethnicity, gender, social class, immigrant status, and sexual orientation, and other dimensions of identity, shape our life prospects from birth until death. Many aspects of yourself matter more than many of us want to acknowledge, because doing so means admitting that life isn’t actually an equal, and that the American dream is more easily fulfilled for some people than others. Ethnic minorities are often disadvantaged through being discriminated against at work, when looking for accommodation, health services and through various levels of law and order.
Here at XYZ Industries Inc. we believe in diversity and we want to celebrate the nature of our diversity. Because we are a company filled with great employees from different beliefs, race, color, and sexual orientation; starting this year the office will no longer host an annual Christmas Party. We will instead host a Winter Celebration. In an effort to be more accepting of individuals from all cultures and beliefs, we will no longer partake in activities affiliated solely with Christmas such as Secret Santa,
Before leaving, I liked to think that I had a decent amount of encounters with diversity. I faced it every day walking through the halls and classrooms of my high
For the most part I have not seen a whole lot of diversity in my community but I hear about diversity all the time on the news. I feel like we have benefited from the influence of people from different parts of the world because it helps us understand other people’s cultures and traditions. It helps us to understand the diversity in the world and to better accept it as a whole.
Often times when people think of diversity they focus on the external differences, race, ethnicity, and national origin. By this definition the U.S.A. is among the most diverse countries in the world and becoming more so every day. I have close friends and acquaintances from a wide range of backgrounds and in my experience I see a greater differences in individuals than between backgrounds. My sisters whom have been brought up in the exact same family situation and
Growing up I lived in a small town in a small county. My town had a population of 500 people – 499 white, 1 black. In elementary school my class size was never over 25 children, even in high school it stayed around the same size. My graduating class was 183 students which was large for the area. I never had much diversity or realized that I was so sheltered to the diversity our world has to offer.
The two areas that I am the strongest in when we talk about understanding diversity are prejudice and discrimination. We are all different in our own special way; however inside we are all equal. I believe that the way I think has a lot to do with the way I grew up. I was raised in a catholic environment/setting where everyone helped each other out no matter what. Our text explains that “Diversity can be defined as any attribute relevant to an individual that creates or reinforces a perception that he or she is different from another individual” (De Janasz, Dowd, & Schneider, 2014, p. 113). Now a day there is a lot of prejudice, this judgment in my opinion is not fair. We can’t just stereotype people based on memberships or because they are
Diversity. Culture allows you to be open-minded and accepting of many. If I spend time around the same people, I become dull to topics around the globe. When considering colleges, diversity to me, is on my top 3 list. I do not want to want a life lived in a bubble, oblivious to everything around me. Oblivious to the problems of others. Oblivious to the happiness of others. Oblivious to the savory foods of others. In college, I want the experience of being open-minded and aware of those around me. When choosing a college, I choose a college that opens my mind and eyes and makes me
I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, where diversity is almost everywhere. From places like Oakland, where there are numerous backgrounds, to nearby Brentwood, where there is not much to discover. My personal experiences with diversity stem from my home life. My ethnic background has an array of cultures that all wrap up into my own individual DNA code. I am mixed with African American, Native American, European and Filipino. Growing up, family gatherings were nothing but diverse. There was a time when I found it difficult to come to terms with racial identity, and even more ego damaging racial shame.
Of course, this relationship likely goes both ways, as higher levels of economic development and human capital are likely to be associated with greater tolerance and diversity. That said, openness to diversity is also likely to help prompt economic development by encouraging innovation and enabling societies to better attract and tap into a wide range of talent across lines of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and
After this realization, I felt like I finally had a good way to bridge the gap between fellow students. Inspired to change my school back to the supportive and inclusive place I knew it to be, I designed a program called the “Diversity Discussion” where freshman and sophomores, then juniors and seniors would be mixed up in tables in the gym and encouraged to share their stories respectfully through specific guidelines. There would be language teachers to help everyone communicate their stories, “I am” poem templates on the tables to make sharing or brainstorming one’s story a little easier, and trained equity teachers and members monitoring conversations to make sure they were friendly and insightful, not hateful and hurtful. The other high schools in our district handled the situation more impulsively by doing walkouts. Those were short-term and political solutions. I was determined to evoke real change without getting political.
On the basis of diversity, I am certain that I relate to most of its aspects. I was born in Cameroon, a developing country in Africa. Migrating to The United States exposed me to not just gender diversity, but also to racial, cultural, and religious diversity. I moved to The United States in 2015 at age 15 and started community college at age 16. At the time, I did not view myself as unmindful, but I thought of how my life was going to be like in class. On my first visit to Wayne County Community College District, one of the advisers said to my mother “She is too young to be a full-time college student. I’d advice she does at least a year of high school in The United State so that she can adapt to the lifestyle and prepare for college both socially and mentally.” Diversity is something I relate to and respect so much.
All I see is the same color around me. Faces of familiarity pass and I feel safe. This was my mentality for most of my life. I am from a small, agricultural town in California called Santa Maria. My whole life is based on what this town has provided for me growing up. I want to say that it had done more for me, but truthfully, I can’t quite say it did. At my high school, there seemed to be a lack of quality. It only offered 9 AP classes and had a demographics of 97% Hispanic. It was hard to cater to those who wanted to go to college. My group of friends and I were some of the determined few who wanted to leave to a four-year institution. My local community college was referred as ‘high school: part two’. This in my mind sounded so bad and something I didn’t want to be a part of. The road to college was going to be tricky for me, but I would do whatever I could do the give me the best possible chance.