Cultural Diversity: A lesson from last Spring

This week our book talked about cultural diversity.  Cultural diversity is something you are taught about in school, but unless you actually have some experience with individuals whose culture differs from your own you never really get a full understanding.  In my home town there was not a lot of cultural diversity of any kind.  So in an essence I was in a bubble.  Coming to ISU gave me so many more opportunities to interact with people whose lives and cultures differ from my own and from the bubble that I grew up in.

Last spring I enrolled in a one credit human sciences course called dialog on diversity.  I’m not going to lie the only reason I enrolled in the course at first was because it fit into my schedule and it meets on of the U.S. diversity requirements you have to have to graduate.  With that said, it is vitally important that I mention that by the end of the class I was so glad I had enrolled and I would now recommend taking the course to anyone.  Especially to students from towns like mine where there was very little diversity.  The course met once a week and each week had a specific topic of diversity that ranged from sexism to sexuality and how we view ourselves.  One topic that we covered in class was also talked about in our chapter this week which was the majority privilege.

The thing that probably resonated with me the most from the dialog on diversity class was the week we talked about sexuality.  The instructor had four volunteers who identified as being heterosexual sit in chairs in the front of the room and face each other.  Then she asked us all to answer some questions including “Why are you heterosexual?” or statements like “I think your sexual preference is wrong.”  The idea behind this is that the questions and statements are ones that many heterosexual people pose to homosexuals.  Not only did this exercise open my eyes to how rude these comments were, but also it made me want to be more aware of how I approach people who are different from me in general.

Coming to Iowa State has definitely changed my view on diversity, but I know that there is still much to learn.  I’m just happy to say that I have been making the right steps to change my thoughts an actions when it comes to being aware of diversity and accepting/embracing it.