Cultural Competence Of Diversity In The Workplace

When beginning this course, I had little knowledge of the depth of diversity found in our world today. I lived in a small town, which acted as a shelter from the harsh realities faced by many ethnicities, but also prevented me from experiencing cultural diversity. With my lack of background knowledge concerning diversity, I would say that my level of cultural competence was nearly non-existent. I had never been exposed to any ethnicities, other than my own, until moving to college. It wasn’t until moving away to college that I realized how naïve I was concerning the diversity of our nation. While learning of cultural competence I became aware of all I still needed to learn and experience if I were to become an ethical social worker.
According to the National Education Association cultural competence can be defined as “having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the

I wanted to know how, as a country, we have made great strides in some areas of acceptance, while being stuck in the past in other areas. This question made me eager to research this subject more and quickly discovered that many other people are asking the same question. Alexander Reynolds from the Huffington Post agrees that this is an old problem, but has a simple solution: “Another consideration is more training to deal with people from other cultures. Many police officers come from provincial backgrounds and have had little interaction with people from other cultures in their community. And there would be few complaints of racism if the police continually brushed up on their interpersonal communication skills and silently expunged their institutional fears, delusions, and prejudices, whatever they may or may not be” (Reynolds, 2016). Reynolds emphasized the importance of educating others and us of the cultures that call America