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The Positive and Negative Effects of Diversity
The Positive and Negative Effects of Diversity
Pros and cons of diversity in society
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Being a minority and trying to cope with the American way is a difficult obstacle to overcome. A minority comes from different cultures and lifestyles, especially the parents which means a young youth who is a minority has a specific lifestyle to live because the parents want their child to live similarly to tradition. However, there are young minorities who are trying to bridge their personal tradition and their own American tradition together to better their life. For instance, in the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, illustrates a young Native American youth, Junior, struggling with friends pressuring him to follow tradition instead of living a different life. Despite the struggles and pressures, he is pursuing his dream instead of following tradition. Therefore, an individual does not need to follow their community norms, instead he or she can follow their own aspiration, but the person will struggle against negativity pressure from their community and peers because the individual is living a different life. Despite the struggle the individual will encounter, he or she can change their community for the better because they have improve their own life.
Minority individuals who are raised in the United States live in community where norms are trying to be preserve; therefore, traditions are strictly enforce by peers, family, and friends because they believe it is the only way to live. In other words, minority youths are forced to learn their community’s norms in America because their own kind are afraid that the norms will be lost. For instance, Junior is a representative of a young minority youth force to practice the norms in his Native American reservation. In his reservation, the s...
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A lone person that differs from their community norms becomes hope after evolving as an individual. To prove the above claim, Junior who experiences two worlds have learn about the pros and cons of his two communities. He is educated through the American education and is able to teach his reservation peers. Furthermore, he have learned about the lifestyle Americans live and he can slowly help implement the tactics that works best to his family and community. Junior will slowly be able to create hope in his reservation and many youths will be able to continue the path of success. As a result, communities improvement come from individuals who thrive to make their lives healthier than before.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman, Ellen Forney, and Mechthild Hesse.
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. Stuttgart: Klett Sprachen, 2009. Print.
Stensland, Anna Lee. “Indian Boyhood by Charles A. Eastman’” The English Journal 66, no. 3 (1977): 59.
The Diversity of the writers, Cisneros, McKay and Lee, all express life, struggles with being a minority in America. You see them identifying how society sees’s them and they accepting their heritage. You see them struggle to form a bridge of how their cultural heritage and the American culture will co-exist within themselves and
Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his essay, it is evident that he faces many issues and is very frustrated growing up as an American Indian. Growing up, Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.
So many things have said about the cultural assimilation, and so many people have struggled to live the new society to prove themselves and work hard to absorb the new life by learning the language and new culture. So many people devoted their lives to assimilate to be part of American society. Cultural assimilation does not only means to survive in the new life, but also people who try to fit in the new society. A society where people are not judged by their class, money, or education, but are determined by race, color, religion, and where they come from. Do we really and profoundly feel what it means to be part of new society? Do we keep following the stereotypes that we have created in our very own minds, which is, if we speak the same language with same exact dialect, and we share common interests from the new culture, we lose our own cultural roots or background? To make a long story short, what is cultural assimilation means? One of the brilliant examples from personal experience is revealing a particular point of view on the matter of the outstanding work of Richard Rodriguez “Hunger of Memory”. Rodriguez shows cultural assimilation in his personal examples, and displays the issue completely by talking about himself as a Mexican-American who tried to survive a new way of life to become something of himself. In this book, Rodriguez tries to idealize not only his way of life when he assimilates, but he includes his feeling of being alienated from his own culture, his background, society, and his family. He believes that his existence in American society made him understand what it is to be a Mexican American, and what it is to be a minority f...
At these boarding schools, Native American children were able to leave their Indian reservations to attend schools that were often run by wealthy white males. These individuals often did not create these schools with the purest of intentions for they often believed that land occupied by Native American Tribes should be taken from them and put to use; it is this belief that brought about the purpose of the boarding schools which was to attempt to bring the Native American community into mainstream society (Bloom, 1996). These boarding schools are described to have been similar to a military institution or a private religious school. The students were to wear uniforms and obey strict rules that included not speaking one’s native tongue but rather only speaking English. Punishments for not obeying such rules often included doing laborious chores or being physically reprimanded (Bloom, 1996). Even with hars...
Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search for cultural identity within a smaller community, others are trying to find their place in the majority culture. (Bucher and Hinton, 2010)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles Junior’s journey to discovery of self. As with many developing teens, he finds himself spanning multiple identities and trying to figure out where he belongs. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other” (p.118). On the reservation, he was shunned for leaving to go to a white school. At Reardon, the only other Indian was the school mascot, leaving Junior to question his decision to attend school he felt he didn’t deserve. Teens grappling with bicultural identities can relate to Junior’s questions of belonging. Not only is Junior dealing with the struggle between white vs. Indian identities, but with smaller peer group identities as well. In Wellpinit, Junior is th...
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
Boys in the Native American culture are pushed to be good runners, skilled hunters, and good warriors. When they achieve this they are considered men in their society. When they become too old to do all of this they become counselors of the village. Women are expected to raise children, make food, and take care of the children for a lifetime. There is no police force, government, or punishment in their culture. They do not need it. These r...
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