Our Multicultural World
“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the souls of its people.” –Ghandi
What is culture?
“Culture is the learned, shared symbols, language, values, and norms that distinguish one group of people from another”–K. Floyd, Communication Scholar.
Our culture is more about who raises us, where we grow up, our friends, our media, our schools, and so forth, rather than our DNA.
We live in a beautiful multicultural world. This enriches our lives by offering us more breadth and depth of possible life experiences.
There are four major components of culture:
Symbols: something that represents an idea.
Language: researchers believe that there are about 6,800 languages used in the world. Language allows us for written and speech communication.It passes culture from one generation to the next. Many languages are in danger of extinction.
Values: the standards a culture uses to judge how good, desirable, or beautiful something is.
Norms: rules and expectations that guide people’s behavior.
These four components of culture help structure it but the people are the actual essence and aesthetic of a culture.
Unfortunately, in the world of picture books our beautiful multicultural world isn’t represented very well.
There are some organizations like First Book.org who are working to fix this. I support their efforts!
I hope to read many more books that do a better job at representing our beautiful multicultural world.
I wanted to read and comment on this post because last semester I took a history class where the teacher based the semester on multiculturalism. The class ended up being really cool and we read a book called “a different mirror” by Ronald Takaki. the book starts out with a story of Ronald getting off a plane to be the keynote speaker at a multiculturalism event. He got into a taxi and the taxi cab driver saw that he was Japanese. He asked him how long he had been in the United States because his English was so good. He said that he had been here all his life. His grandfather had come over from Japan in the 1880s. He said my family has been here for over 100 years. The car ride was awkward for the remainder of the drive because of what had happened. Americans aren’t white people. They are whatever they are, as stupid as that sounds. It isn’t something I had ever put much thought into before having read this book. But, I didn’t disagree with any of it. I am no more american than any other citizen.
That book sounds really interesting. Thanks for sharing!