Treating our cultural differences as an asset rather than a problem

Sam Smith –I was one of six children and so learned early in life that other people weren’t like me. After all I had one sister who voted for Donald Trump and a brother who married a Puerto Rican woman.

The lesson I learned as a youngster, although I didn’t have the language for it at the time, was that the world was multicultural and that I had to get along with all sorts of people with different stories and different values. In America alone there were over 300 million folk living  different lives than mine.

This turned out to be quite a useful discovery. For example, in the 1960s, I found myself working with several ministers and priests on the social and political issues of the time. I called myself a seventh day agnostic but realized that we could share our common views even though we had reached them in strikingly different ways.

Living in what was then the majority black town of DC made multiculturalism a daily event. One of the things I learned was that common issues can actually bring people together. I was, for example, introduced to the civil rights movement by taking part in a protest against a DC Transit fare increase led by the black Marion Barrry who would go on to be the first chair of SNCC and mayor of DC. Barry visited me after the article appeared and we work on various projects together.  Among the issues that joined whites and blacks were the lack of home rule in the city and stopping freeways that could mess up both black and white neighborhoods. 

Becoming a journalist had made personal cultural variety an even more common event for me. Majoring in anthropology didn’t hurt. Nor did growing up in a house where the family’s black cook reasonably claimed that it was she, and not my mother, who had raised me.

What has become increasingly clear was that the world – starting with my family – was varied and I had to learn how to get along with those of different styles, values and skin color.

My multicultural experience was a gift to me, but has left me wondering how we can help others treat it as a positive goal rather than endless problems to be overcome.

I suspect that teaching multicultural skills in schools would help. But we shouldn’t treat it just as a problem but rather as a healthy status to be achieved and enjoyed. One of my great pleasures in life has been having friends and allies who didn’t talk or look like me