Positive Outcomes of Diversity: Argumentative Essay

If we have perspective on what others know, we can learn how to achieve things in a new way. When we try to do something that has worked many times in the past, but doesn’t work now, that is called a mental set. When we are set in doing something the way it has worked before, this causes complications and hinders our work. With the point of view of others, we can do things in new approaches. Perspective is what makes us have a stronger sense of the world, because we can capture things from another person’s point of view. Perspective is a great resource in helping people to accept diversity.

Diversity is what makes America unparalleled. America has the most abundant amount of diversity in the world, but America probably has the most skepticism of other cultures. When people learn that they have more in common than not, they can start to unite across the impediments that were thwarting them from connecting before. We can’t judge a book by its cover, and it is true. We can’t base what we will have in common with another person based on skin color. We need to step outside our comfort zones and talk to other people. See what we have in common and relate to them in new ways. In the book Outcasts United by Warren St. John, many of the boys came from different regions of the world, and sometimes those nations were fighting each other. When they started to play soccer, the boys would only play with people from their own country, but eventually they discovered that they all had something in common: soccer. They learned to look past the skin color of the other boys and accept them for who they were. In the movie The Lost Boys of Sudan, one of the boys said that, “white people look at you like you are going to stab them.” We need to overcome our differences and rejoice in our similarities (St. John, 2009) (Shenk and Mylan, 2003).

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America is a phenomenal “melting pot” of people and cultures, but those cultures shouldn’t have to lose their tradition or heritage. Ethnicity, race, and culture are all the flavors in the soup that combine into what America really is. We are entirely bandits when it comes to other cultures; we have Mexican restaurants, Asian buffets, and Italian pizzerias. You can go to your local supermarket and buy any type of food product that you want, no matter the culture. We all give a little and take a little; therefore, we shouldn’t pass judgment on others for something that they or their society does. Many people are worried, closed-minded, judgmental, and uninformed of those around them. We need to defeat these barriers and accept others for who they are, “not by making ‘them’ like ‘us’, but rather by creating a new, more capacious sense of ‘we’” (Putnam, 2007).

How then, can individuals, communities, and states achieve positive outcomes of diversity? Recognition for diversity is but a first step. To fortify shared identities, we need more chances for meaningful collaboration across ethnic lines where Americans work, learn, recreate, and live…Most immigrants want to acculturate – to learn English, for example…our arena of study suggests that locally based plans to reach out to new immigrant communities are a influential tool for joint learning (Putnam, 2007).

We need to involve our communities in more cultural art experiences, become more tolerant of others around us, and reach out to new individuals. These concepts alone won’t make people accepting of diversity, but they can support in the progression of diversity. By bringing diversity into works of art, you can spark a dialogue with the artist about why he or she decided to paint, act, or write what his or her past and culture. “The arts, in [Tagore’s] view, promote both inner self-cultivation and responsiveness to others. The two typically develop in tandem, since one can hardly cherish in another what one has not explored” (Nussbaum, 2010).

A great example of a traditional art occasion would be Pow-Wows; they show a great exhibit of cultural heritage through dancing and singing. You can learn many things by attending Pow-Wows and you can also talk to the dancers about their culture. These events can help unite people across cultural barriers that may or else have prohibited them from encountering each other. Art can educate people to be more accepting of others by helping them to appreciate other societies. Public advisers need to put more arts on display, either in museums, theaters, or libraries; public members need to be held responsible though and attend these cultural events. It is not only up to the public leaders, but the community members as well.

Civic members play a crucial role in assisting to accept a range of diversity. If the community members don’t attend the events that are there to promote them, whose fault is it but their own? With that, the public organizers could hold more social events in the community for all the members of that community and surrounding communities to attend. If the population had more social events, more people could engage in conversation with others from different cultures and experiences. Community representatives need to understand that they have more in common with the people around them than not. This would put more people in contact with those of other ethnicities, thus creating trust and a greater perception of “we.”

When individuals trust others in their community, this helps everyone to feel better. If the community representatives start to associate with people of different races in the community, then this also helps the society. People tend to feel more comfort with those who are most like them, but if we can dissolve the barriers, then more and more community members will feel comfortable with others. This can help people to recognize that they have more in common than they understood. When you realize that you have more in common with a person than you thought, this helps your perception grow. Learning more about others shapes what your perspective is and will be.

We need to recognize that diversity is all around us individually, locally, and nationwide. We can do this by starting with ourselves. We need to treat others with the same respect that we would want to be treated with. We must accept that there are going to be others that are different from us no matter where we go in the world. Diversity doesn’t seek to take away from any one person’s uniqueness, but rather to combine everyone’s differences into something that we can all learn from. As individuals we need to seek out those who are dissimilar from ourselves so that we might become more trusting of them. We need to gain a larger picture of the world and discover more about ourselves and others from those around us. After we accept that diversity independently, then we can work on diversity on a local level i.e. communities.

Communities play a large role in promoting diversity, whether they are discouraging or inciting diversity. In Robert Putnam’s article, he talked about how we need to reach out to new people, specifically immigrants. He indicated that, “’11:00 am Sunday is the most segregated hour in the week.’” (Putnam, 2007). As societal members we should encourage those who are of different cultures to join us on Sunday morning for church, or maybe ask to join them. We need to break the chains that are tying us down and start to receive others around us. Assortment can be a great asset to our society if we would only look around us and see that everyone is like us in one way or another (Putnam, 2007).

We can also help others of diverse cultures by taking them with us to public experiences, introducing them to others, or simply helping them out when they are diligent and need a friend. We need to encourage trust in those who don’t know anyone else in the community, however, “we need to work toward bridging, as well as bonding.” As much as we should close the gap between different cultures, we also need to connect with other cultures as well. All stages of accepting diversity are connected. First, we need to accept diversity individually, then locally, and lastly on a national scale.

Our nation can promote variety by expunging the stereotypes that are commonly shown. We live in a time and age where diversity is a more prevalent issue than ever before. We have had a black president who won to a woman running for the vice president. We have senators of all distinct religions as well as races. Our nation is shifting significantly every day, and we are becoming more and more disparate. Our nation’s role is to promote diversity as a whole and then our societies in turn can act upon those theories. Even in today’s day and age when we are technologically expanded far beyond many other countries, we are still not collectively forward-thinking. People are perpetrating hate crimes and resorting to brutality as a way of dealing with diversity, but we cannot recourse to violence.

Diversity is something to be commended and community members should not remedy to violence. Forcefulness only instills animosity and bitterness in people. When people carry out hate crimes, it is because they do not completely identify with people from other cultures or because they themselves were an object of a hate crime, violence is only a domino effect. “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert” (King, 1958)

In conclusion, variety is needed for people to gain more perspective; without the perspective of other cultures, we cannot comprehend those around us and resolve problems pertaining to race and ethnicity. There are individuals all around us who we could connect with, if we would only attempt to see the connections. There are so many networks that could be made if we would only try. We must concede that diversity is ubiquitously around us, become conscious of other cultures, and accept that diversity will always be a challenge but with one step at a time we can overcome the challenges of diversity. It is upon those values that diversity can be understood and exulted over.

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