Embracing Culture

So many of us have been disconnected from our cultures. Let's embrace it instead.

Whether you are a first generation or seventh (plus) generation, our connections with our cultures and ethnicities are important to our identities. Along with navigating our comfortability to our length of generations comes navigating our cultural expressions in environments that either support or shame our expression to do so.

Embracing culture and diversity is the act of “appreciating the differences in individuals from a variety of cultural and ethnic groups within an organization.” As it is essential to respect others cultural identities it is equally essential to respect, honor, and embrace our own cultural backgrounds as well whether we have a close connection to our roots or not. Although some situations may not allow us to have easy access to a clear tie or information to our culture, it is still important to hold ourselves accountable to learning about our own cultures and ethnicities as it is a key part of our identities and even an automatic relation to a common community.

Some of the situations that could prevent an individual from embracing their cultural backgrounds include individuals living in an area that doesn’t consist much of their own ethnicity, an adopted child of a differing family ethnicity, a young adult now living in a newly populated area without much of their ethnicity, etc. Thus travel and change can play a huge (if not only) factor in an individual’s comfortability to embrace their own cultures, especially if they are isolated by other individuals or simply not supported in their cultural differences. Such actions of unsupportiveness include shaming or looking down upon others for “differences” in diet, gender roles, family hierarchy, mother tongue, morality, ethnic food dishes, cultural clothing or accessories, age milestones or celebrations, etc. Shaming or looking down upon others for such differences is an unfair and discriminatory way of life since such differing actions aren't “oddities” or “unusual”, but are simply just another type of lifestyle.

Just as it is embraced to be unique and your own individual person, it is also just as important to embrace what makes us similar and the same with other groups of people which can be our cultural backgrounds. Although some of us may not have grown up in our home countries, having a shared root to the same culture and history allows us to automatically have a connection in identity with others. Thus no matter how we identify or how connected we feel to our identity, acknowledging and embracing our cultural backgrounds allow us to have a premade similarity with others that can already start a friendship. These types of buildable friendships can also extend right into our own families and older generations since we are able to carry the legacy and heritage of our people into the new era of life and continue to spread culture to others.

Works Cited:

10 ways to embrace cultural diversity in your workplace. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2021, from https://www.goldencarers.com/10-ways-to-embrace-cultural-diversity-in-your-workplace/5723/