Final Reflection on Diversity of the Human Experience

Diversity sure is a buzzword these days. We hear it on television, we read it in the newspaper, and we may have even said it a couple of times ourselves. But what does it mean? What do we mean when we say diversity? I think in regular speech we mean that there are many different ways of life all around us. When we see it on television it usually means that someone from another country did something relatively cool or original. In light of this way of thinking about diversity, what meaning does the goal Diversity have? I think that the goal of diversity is important not because it points out differences in cultures, because any five-year old can do that, but I think it is important because what we are learning is to appreciate and celebrate those differences. I wrote about this in my first critical essay after reading the book Persepolis.

So by having Diversity as a goal and studying it we not only understand different cultures and ways of life, but we also learn to appreciate them, but why is this so important? What can we learn from other cultures that would be useful in our own? The answer to that lies in our culture itself. We, as Americans, live in a culture that is made up of many different parts of many other cultures because of the way our country was populated. While we call our culture our own, very few parts of it are originally from here. When we study different cultures we can see where some of our traditions are from, what their original purpose was, and maybe why we still practice them today. In this way we can learn something about ourselves through the study of others. I originally came to this idea of diversity when I was writing my second term reflection about the subject.

We have now seen that the study of diversity produces understanding, both about other peoples as well as ourselves, but what happens if we don’t study diversity? What happens if we come to the idea that the way other people do things is of no importance to us in our daily lives? This dark side of diversity, this refusal to see different ideas as equal but different (or not so different as we have seen) has been the cause of some of the most terrible atrocities known to man. Before WWII started there was a growing separatist movement in quite a few countries, but Germany is the one I’m sure we are all familiar with. These people listened to a man who said that the Jews were the cause of all of Germany’s problems, because they were different. Instead of examining what made the Jews different from them (and in many cases it was only the word Jew) they embraced the idea, starting what we now call the Holocaust. If there had been more understanding of different cultures this never would have happened, because people would have seen that it was not the differences in society that made them weaker, but rather it was those very differences that made them who they were.

There have been many terrible things done because of the lack of understanding of diversity, and this holds true even here in America. We looked at a film in about the incidents in Waco, Texas with the Branch Davidians. This whole situation stemmed from a lack of understanding for different ways of life and ended in tragedy. I wrote about the gross errors made by our law enforcement in my reflection on that movie, and the thoughts on this paper began in that one. It seems so terrible, that even here, in a place that we feel gives so much tolerance to different cultures, things like this can happen. While not on the same level as the Holocaust by far, both of those terrible actions could have been prevented by studying Diversity.

From these things we see that Diversity of the Human experience is a good goal to have because it shows us the difference between recognizing differences and understanding them as well as allowing us to appreciate other cultures and learning something about ourselves in the process. Having this goal also helps to prevent horrible things that can happen when we don’t take the time to try and understand why people are different and why these ways are different from out own, not better or worse. It is for this reason and many others that we study Diversity of the Human experience in Freshman Inquiry here at PSU.