What Is Racism And Cultural Diversity?

The goal of an education is to gain knowledge to help improve one’s understanding of the world. If we shy away from topics like racism and cultural diversity, then we risk not being able to understand a huge part of the way our world works. Consider this: are all the people we converse with in a day the same ethnicity? Are they all from the same cultural background? If they all are the same ethnicity or from the same cultural background, then one might not need to understand why cultural diversity affects how someone would respond to a problem or situation. Let’s face it: the world is not homogenous there are multiple different races and cultures. We need to teach not judge others without getting to know them first.

A crucial aspect to understanding

If the teacher were to say “we live in a world where equality is tested daily; that a black man will face significant challenges throughout his [or her] life” (Hamilton), the students’ reaction may to automatically start placing blame on the white students. While the challenges African Americans face today are still significant, it does not help matters to phrase it in a way that encourages the students to feel that they need to continue the hatred or create a need to pity them. According to Gary Hamilton, he had a teacher who said “we live in a world where equality is tested daily; that a black man will face significant challenges throughout his [or her] life” without further explaining why the teacher thought the way he did. Hamilton’s resulting confusion caused by the statement was what lead to fight between him and his friend, Michael: “a minor disagreement brought out a rage I had never known in my 6th grade body. I pulled Michael’s hair because it was blond. I hit whatever part of his body wasn 't covered. I aimed for his face as much as I could.” This section describes a white male 's features emphasizing the reason the attack occurred. Prior to the altercation, Hamilton talks about how he had only thought of Michael as a friend, a buddy to hang out with. There was no difference in color between the two they were and had always been just friends.

By starting this young, teachers will be able help students to be more open to ideas and opinions others have. A way in teachers might do this is by getting the students involved in a kinesthetic activity where they are required to move around based on the answers they give. The way this activity works is the teachers asks the students a series of different questions pertaining to various subjects. Based on the answer to the question the student would then move to the corresponding corner that answers that question. The following is a list of example questions the teacher would ask: ‘what is your favorite activity?, what is your favorite subject?, and do you like sports?’. These questions would then be integrated with questions that deal with cultural diversity. Some cultural diverse questions would be ‘do you speak more than one language?, what is your favorite holiday?, and what ethnicity are you? The goal of asking these questions is to get the students to realize they share similar interests no matter what culture they are from.

In addition the teacher could cultivate student’s interest in different cultures by spending a few weeks teaching different languages. For example the students would learn greetings and common phrases in Spanish one week then the next week it would French and so on. To help the students remember the teacher could give the student post-it notes with