YadaBlog

Ten or fifteen years ago I bristled when multicultural pundits stated how terrible it was that the majority of students socialized with people of their own race. The inference here was that their social groups were not racially, ethnically, or socioeconomically diverse. The reason for this was obvious to me. You hang with people who are like you; people that will understand you.

At that time, I felt that someone of a different social economic background, for example, might not understand my station in life, so I would not associate myself with them. Not because I felt they were better or worse than me, or that I harbored ill feelings to people like them, but because they were different and, because of that difference, they would not understand me. The same sentiment was true for people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

Although I had acquaintances of different races, they were not part of my closest social network because either I felt they could not understand where I came from because of our racial differences, or because I could not understand where they came from. We were cordial toward one another, and even friendly, but they were not the friends in which I confided.

I also had associations with people of different religious beleifs. Again, even though we did not discuss these beliefs, they percollated into our discourse, our way of relating to the world around us. This is only natural. Each of us have been raised with one beleif system or another. It is our compass and, as a compass, it is sometimes quite pointed. This difference in the way we read our world made a deeper association unlikely.

I read an article today, Critical Issues: Educating Teachers for Diversity,it brought all of this back to my mind. It also made me think of how far we have come. I see diverse social groups in my classroom where as I did not see much fifteen years ago (I have been at the same school for seventeen years). The students today have been taught to understand differences in their classmates and to value those differences. Therefore, their social groups are diverse social-economically, racially and ethnically.

I saw similarly diversity in my daughters social groups in middle school. Again, this generation grew up with the multicultural movement. Interestingly though, that diversity is not as prevelent in her group of friends in high school. Is that because of the greater numbers of students with which to associate? If there are more people like you, do you gravitate to them instead incorporating diversity in your associations? Or, is the lack of diversity in her social groups due to the foibles of the adolescent mentality?

I also began to think about the impact technology may be having on bringing diverse people together. For example, only those who know who it is writing this know my race, my religion, my ethnicity and my socio-economic status. If you don’t know me, you may not have a clue as to my diversity or lack thereof, and if I did a good job editing out those references you have no clue. Maybe you will be more apt to listen to what I am saying if I am just black characters on a white space and therefore more inclined to understand my ideas without the preconceptions that differences carry with them. If this is the case then there is much potential for the read/write web to positively effect how we deal with people who are different than us.

If your child has a MySpace page, look at his or her friends. I bet you will see more diversity than the even the public school system affords. My daughter’s does. Is that because she first sees her friends thoughts and ideas before she see there photograph?