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How To Achieve Diversity In America

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Culture makes up people’s everyday lives—what they wear, how they talk, and even how they act in certain situations—but one’s own culture is something with which he is so familiar that often he does not realize the implications of being defined by it. Being born into a culture and growing up in it makes it seem like the norm, but there are those who do not have that luxury. Some people feel isolated because their culture does not fit what mainstream culture sees as the norm. That is what the study of and push for multiculturalism in America is all about today: finding ways to incorporate into classrooms the diversity of all the different cultures that make up the people of America.
But what are culture, multiculturalism, and diversity? From one of the videos watched in class, culture has four components that define it: symbols, language, values, and norms. Culture is a group of people’s shared symbols, language, values, and norms …show more content…

Therefore, culture is how we speak, act, relate to others, and what we think is right and wrong. However, there are many different cultures, even within the United States, and this is what diversity is. As said by Tonia Durden about students, diversity is those “who are distinguished from mainstream society by their primary language, ethnicity, and social class” (2008, p. 403-404). In addition, in the video “Why Cultural Diversity Matters” by Michael Gavin (2014), diversity is discussed as being a difference in language, race, gender, sexual orientation, and any number of other factors within a group of people. Diversity at its most basic boils down to a difference in culture among groups of people. In a similar vein, multicultural education

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