Culture and Diversity Program Transcript NARRATOR: Everything we do and think is related to culture.
Culture is complex, consisting of easily recognizable elements, as well as more hidden yet equally powerful factors. How do we assure that in our interactions with others we take into consideration all aspects of each other’s cultures? In what ways can we interact with others so that all of us feel visible, respected and empowered? Listen closely as Janet Gonzalez-Mena discusses the nature of culture and diversity. JANET GONZALEZ-MENA: My idea of what culture is, is a set of often unconscious rules that govern everything we do that we learn early on and culture and gender are always intertwined. Women sit one particular way in some cultures and men another particular way in some cultures. I mean these are little things, these are huge things. They involve perspectives, they involve world views, they involve beliefs about what children need, who children are, what they should become. It’s just an enormously interesting complex subject. And it’s been said often enough to make it almost a cliché that culture is like an iceberg, that only the tip of it shows and all the rest, that’s the part that’s easy to celebrate; the food, the music, the customs, the books, the literature, all that wonderful stuff that’s so diverse around the world. But the unconscious part, that huge 90% of the iceberg that lurks below the surface is where the tensions come in, as people have very different ideas about what children need, for example. And it’s also important to not pick up on somebody’s cultural background and decide you can predict how they’re gonna behave or to look at somebody and decide what their cultural background is because it’s a lot more complex than that. The way culture is learned is from the people around you. And infants and toddlers have traditionally been with families or close friends or relatives. So now, and especially as our country becomes increasingly diverse, with children in out-of- home care who haven’t learned who they are and where they belong and what their culture is are learning it away from home, to some extent. So why this is so important is that diversity is a benefit. It’s richness. It’s a necessity. It should be– identity formation should be an additive process. As children learn new things and take on new languages, new ideas, new perspectives, it should be in addition to what they have at home. They should always be able to go home again and belong. That’s what it means to be a truly bicultural person, when you go home and you still fit and you go out and you fit too.