Common Ground Beyond Cultural Identity

Cultural diversity flourishes in the United States even though the golden door are no longer as open as they once were. Americans’ doors have rusted shut through disuse. It doesn’t matter how many people come to the United States looking for freedom and opportunity there will always be groups of people who voluntarily discredit immigrants. Despite Emma Lazarus’s optimistic view, immigrants have and will almost always be looked upon with a predisposition of judgement and shame. With this they will most likely have a harder time reaching the freedom they aspired for.

Jaswinder Bolina uses his identification as Other, to describe difficulties within the writing and speaking community related to what is commonly identified as “white” English in his essay, Writing Like a White Guy.

If we take a look at the different cultures in the world, we will see that the idea of what is ethically acceptable is vastly different. When the United Nations signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they had attempted to provide the world with a guideline of how we should ethically treat people. In many cases this declaration did not succeed and different cultures have their own ethical guidelines which go against this declaration. These culture specific ethics are defined as cultural relativism (Brusseau, 2012). Cultural relativism is the belief that ethics are not the result of universal reason; they are solely based on the individual cultures history (Brusseau, 2012).

Jade: Do you or anyone you know find it hard to balance your culture and the American culture?

In writing, there are several disciplinary conventions that categorize a piece of writing. Writing is most often split into three disciplines; the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The conventions structure, language, and reference found in a piece of writing help further organize the writing into a discipline. At first glance, John Streamas’s “Narrative Politics in Historical Fictions for Children” and Lora E. Vess’s “Examining Race & Racism in the University: A Class Project” do not appear to be difficult to categorize; Streamas’s article is for the humanities, while Vess’s article is for the social sciences. However, the line between the two article’s

Everyday I walk into my English class is the moment I experience an identity crisis. As I approach the entrance to the class, I already detected the dichotomy in the room. On the right side lies the Caucasian students, and on the left, resides the International Chinese students. As the only Asian American in the class, I struggle to select the correct side.

There are other movements, beside physical body movement, allowed by our brain of which individuals are not conscious, or at least not fully conscious; namely, the action of remembering and forgetting. According to Pierre Nora memory “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting” (8) process which he claims to be “unconscious”. It is given to this dialectic, as Jan Assmann mentions in his essay Collective Memory and Cultural Identity that ““the survival of the type” in the sense of a cultural pseudo-species is a function of the cultural memory…” (126), which means: first, that the identity of a place is not inherited through genes; and second, that it depends on individuals’ conscious effort to maintain it. Individual memory or communicative memory as Assmann calls it “does not extent more than eighty to (at the very most) hundred years…” (127). All of which indicates that our brain will forget memories which are not use; from there society inclination to records.

What do Mexicana Teachers that Suffer from Depression Believe They Need to be Effective Teachers?

The use of ethos helps with the author’s credibility and he succeeds at it by quoting credible sources regarding the issues discussed in his essay. For example, Blumenfeld quotes President Theodore Roosevelt and exposes his point of view regarding the presence of non-English languages in the United States and how the things that “we have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English Language” (1). Bluemenfeld uses quotes in order to present to the audience of his essay both point of views. In this case, he presents the ones who agree with English being the one and only language spoken in the U.S. Among other quotes, the Blumenfeld also cites people who do not support the discrimination of multicultural and multilingual presence in the country like the National Association for Multicultural Education whereas they state that “multicultural education is a philosophical concept built on the ideas of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity…”

One of the most heated issues concerning American education today is the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to K to 12 students. A common challenge is often intertwined in the concept of racial inequality, just in time when the modern time may be calling for multicultural education. In the article by Gloria Ladson-Billings entitled “New Directions in in Multicultural Education”, she discusses first the different definitions of multiculturalism as well as the tensions these descriptions create, and then proceeds to using critical race theory to explain how it can be incorporated fairly and positively in education. Wittily compares multiculturalism education to jazz, Ladson-Billings (2004) firstly argues that the former is just as beautifully

In his paper,"Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space," Brent Staples clarifies how for the duration of his life, others have oppressed him in light of the fact that he is a tall, dark man who fills in as a writer in a transcendently white field. As he clarifies, he initially acknowledged the amount of his appearance terrified others, especially a white lady, when he used to take late night strolls as a graduate understudy. While he comprehends that we live in a society that has turned out to be progressively savage and perilous, he feels disappointed that dark men, specifically, are as yet being judged and misconstrued in view of their appearance alone. For instance, he refers to two occurrences where he was mixed

Critical Race theory includes concepts of color blindness, unmarked whiteness, segregation, white supremacy and many other sub-categories that may be seen as a marginalization to people of color. Christopher Riley and Nancy Ettlinger conducted a study in Columbus, Ohio correlating to the Critical Race Theory. Klaeido High School in Ohio proved to be the ideal site because initially this school was predominantly black and white. New job opportunities arose in this community through policies changes that aided refugees with job placements. The community therefore had an influx of new residents such as and El Salvadorans; Mexicans and Samoans. This created a lot of tension in the school showing a program was needed to address multiculturalism. An after school program was created to teach the students about the different cultures. Later these program was included as part of history class due to low participation in the after school program.

If you were to ask me four years ago who I would imagine myself ending up like after high school, it would not be who I am today. The 13 long, and sometimes dreaded, years I experienced in school helped me discover the type of person I wanted to become. Finishing high school was the first milestone that I achieved as an adult and helped me discover my adulthood. Parker Palmer states student fears in his essay “The Courage to Teach” and Amy Tan discusses language barriers in her essay “Mother Tongue” which showed me how it was that I overcame my fear of rejection and the feeling of being ashamed about my mothers broken English. It is through their work that I can relate my personal struggles I encountered while finding my identity.

Cross-cultural comparison, in which the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of people from different cultural backgrounds are examined, constitutes an important part of psychological researches (Morren, Gelissen, & Vermunt, 2011). In regard to the validity of cultural comparison, one may wonder whether it is possible to achieve such a comparison; after all, people from different cultural contexts have different languages and ideologies, and they may understand and respond to the topic investigated differently. This question has long been addressed in the literature, and the answer to it is to establish equivalence, or comparability.

The different cultures are also mentioned in an assigned book in this course such as “Coming of Age in America: a Multicultural Anthology” is a collection of short stories, and it is edited by Mary Frosch with an introduction by Gary Soto. Through different stories of this book, I notice the differences totally impact to people’s lives and emotions. Personally, I think this class has been fostering and stimulating my understanding about diverse cultures around the world. I also see many pictures of my life in my classmate’s life stories. We did develop sympathy and empathy with others during the presentations. Many of the problems we have in this world are due to misunderstandings the difference in cultures. Therefore, we need to respect, and value the difference cultures in our life because they are a strong part of our