A college campus like ours is a cultural melting pot, a gumbo of people representing a diverse array of backgrounds, ethnicities and ideas. We have all kinds of people nonchalantly whizzing past each other on a daily basis.
I always felt like this was sad because even in college, we tend to only make friends with people who seem mostly like us or outwardly represent the same values and goals as we do.
I thought an important part of the college experience was to immerse ourselves in other cultures. Yet when you walk around campus you don’t really see people doing much of that. A lot of us will graduate having never joined any organizations that teach us anything about other people. We will graduate knowing nothing new about any international students, let alone knowing anything about this little town we call home for much of the year.
Culture has been defined as a set of ‘shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize an institution, organization and/or group.’ In my case, culture affects everything from what friends I choose to hang out with, to my choice of things to do on a Saturday night.
Culture greatly affects how we perceive and relate to each other. Perceptions of each other’s culture are normally deduced from clues based on external things we do and wear that become cultural signposts. These deductions are wrong most of the time because we haven’t taken time to really understand or know this person. This leads to misinformed attitudes, and in extreme scenarios racism and xenophobic sentiments.
The big one for me is how we choose to make assumptions, bury them deep inside ourselves and form these unchanging ideas about one another. We all do this in some way and the worst part is we never ask, we never explore or even attempt to understand each other.
The next big issue becomes, why do I need to care, why do I need to experience other people’s cultures and ideas when I’m so comfortable with my own?
Experiencing other cultures has been viewed as risking the loss of one’s own individual identity. This is not true, because it allows a better appreciation of people as citizens of the world. It further expands borders. It expands our borders in the sense that we come to realize there is more to the world than our immediate realities. The world needs a future of leaders who see human beings first, not a group of heavily polarized nations, races and political groups.
The issue now becomes, how do I expose myself right here on campus and in town? This doesn’t have to be an issue of logistics but more of individuals making an effort to meet people from distant cultures. This could involve anything from joining the African People’s Association to renting a Korean movie.
Cultural experiences can be had anywhere, and can involve many things including attending a rock concert at Howards when you consider yourself a hip hop fan. This would give you an opportunity to experience a type of music you never really appreciated. You could drive to Finders Records and buy a Brazilian jazz CD or tune into one of the many interesting indie music shows on your school radio stations (falconradio.org, WFAL 1610 AM and WBGU 88.1 FM).
A well rounded experience of education isn’t complete until one gets to interact with cultures alien to their own, and have experiences that allow exchange with others and introduce interesting new things.
I watched a movie called ‘The Host’ by a Korean director named Bong Joon-ho, and I’ve become a Korean movie freak. It opened my mind to a form of film that was slightly different from western films, but gave me a unique way of interacting with this interesting culture. I read books by foreign writers and took full advantage of the international perspective courses offered by the school.
We must not allow ourselves to be pulled into the polarized world of xenophobia and general stereotyping of one another. These things have been a result of a general state of ignorance caused by people not taking time to appreciate diversity of all shapes and forms.
As members of an academic institution filled with potential leaders and world citizens, it’s vital to appreciate and respect other cultures by reaching out and interacting.
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