Diversity

Diversity from a multicultural stand point is the ideology of including people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. Ironically we spoke about this today in wellness and I feel it relates entirely to both Bell Hooks passage and “Blue Highways”. We were being questioned as to whether or not we felt there was diversity on our campus. The conclusion we all came up with was that it depends… Everyone interprets it’s differently. For example coming from Miami with such a mixing pot of different Hispanic and ethnic cultures, for me, diversity here is the southern way of life. I had never really been exposed to the accents and the kaki or salmon colored shorts with polo t- shirts. But people from Dallas I’m sure correlate diversity with different Hispanic cultures. So like I said before it is dependent on the person and how they grew up. For Heat Moon, his diversity was steering out of his “norm”, for example speaking and meeting people of a different intelligence and up bringing. Much like Heat Moon, Bell Hooks diversity was meeting people of a different up bringing and social class. Both of which dealt with this new “diversity” differently. Heat Moon was more expecting of it and even learned from the change. Unlike Heat Moon, Bell Hooks was judgmental and tried separating herself from them (upper class, other students). The definition of diversity that I came up with through my eighteen years of experience is just a deviation from the “norm” something.