Personal Narrative: Different Cultures And Diversity

What is culture? Culture is the idea of what is wrong or right, the concept of what is acceptable within our society. Culture serves us as a guide, taking us to the "right way" and helping us to make sense of things that surrounds us. There are many different cultures around the world. A lot of them are similar in specific ways and others are just completely different, this difference explains why we think that people from different backgrounds are "weird".

I was born and raised in the small but growing city of Perris, CA. This isn’t the best city out there but it tends to grow on you, and you begin to truly love it for what it is. The people, however, not so much. The community can vary from which part of the city you’re in. That’s because there’s diversity here in Perris. I’m a product of this diversity, being half Mexican and half African American. My parents fell in love after high school and later on began a family. I am the youngest of five. I have two older brothers, an older sister, and an older cousin who lives with us. The order is boy, girl, boy, boy, girl with my cousin being included in there too. We all live in the same house with my parents and are quite close with each other. They all seem to have raised me growing up due to the fact that my parents were busy trying to provide for us. This was a challenge by itself, resulting in lots of house moving and my father being unemployed for six years after losing his job. I never complained about moving because I knew that my parents were doing their absolute best and were working with all that they had and then some. This unquestionably made me adaptable to new environments and gave me a

What Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci coined "The New World" was now overrun by man-eating zombies. It all started in Chile and Argentina; news of a highly infectious pathogen had begun spreading at breakneck speeds. By the time epidemiologists had discovered the cause of this pathogen it had already spread to the Western half of the United States and was making its way east.

My “outside” cultural influences I have: America is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world culturally. We have German-Americans speaking German, Filipino-Americans speaking Tagalog, Irish-Americans speaking Irish, Scandinavian-Americans speaking Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, etc., Welsh-Americans speaking Welsh, Japanese-Americans speaking Japanese, Iraqi-Americans speaking Arabian, Mexican-Americans speaking Spanish, and all Americans united in the common goal to create the best possible nation in accordance with our Constitution.

They called me an apple. Since I was supposedly red on the outside, but white on the inside, I was automatically a walking bullseye. Being one of the many oppressed Aboriginals, I understand their need to hurt someone else in an effort to release some of their internal pain. I understand why so many give up or turn into raging alcoholics in an effort to numb their pain. Coming from a reservation, my greatest challenge was proving to everyone that all the stereotypes about my people were fallacious. However, the need for a government and an education system that won’t keep on failing us repeatedly is imperative. The only way that I can make my voice heard is to break these stereotypes and to reach a higher education; hence my application for

For my inter-ethnic encounter, I interviewed one of my best friends from high school Ashley Arias. Ashley is nineteen years old, so she is a year younger than me. She is currently pursuing a nursing degree at Notre Dame of Maryland University located in Baltimore, Maryland. She is originally from Virginia but now lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Her immediate family includes her parents and her younger brother. She also has a bulldog that she has had for three years. I have known Ashley for about seven years, but we have been really close for about five of those years starting during my junior year of high school.

Is usual to hear people associating common behaviors from a cultural background to how they expect an individual to act and react to certain situations. So I was really curious to see the results of the self-assessment comparing me to my cultural profile. I was born in Venezuela, and I lived there for most of my life, for that reason I wasn’t really surprised when my answers were almost the same to my cultural norm. The dimensions that I’m most similar to are in leading, trusting, disagreeing, evaluating, and persuading. In “leading”, the scale measures between egalitarian and hierarchical, and my cultural norm and individual answer is more hierarchical than egalitarian. Also, in “trusting” Venezuelans (including me) are definitely a relationship based society, where trust is built by affective connection, for example is very common that most of the business partnerships in Venezuela are made between friends and family rather than with individuals with

Throughout my high school year, majority of my time was spent competing on the track team. I was immersed in diversity when I went to practices and meets. Just the sport itself is a metaphor of diversity. Ranging from the high jump, javelin, and one mile run, there is an event for everyone. I was able to distinguish myself in the sport, choosing my own events and becoming the best I can be.

I was born in the summer of 1964, to lower middle class parents, my mother was divorced with having left three young sons behind with her first husband. My father owned a very popular gas station and repair shop, by birth being the result of a torrid love affair, this topic remained in the gossip pool well into my twenties. I was kept in the dark until Jr. high school, my mother was forced to tell me part of her truth, after the principal sent a note home. My mother suffered from depression and substance abuse as a coping mechanism to sooth her pain. At the age of two my mother gave birth to my sister, although, my mother loved us, I believe her pain tortured her relentlessly. Soon my father choose alcohol to numb his

Sometimes there are books that are so hyped up that you just wonder if they're really all that good. Sometimes you find yourself disappointed, the only person out of your bookish friends who dislikes said book. Other times, you find yourself amidst the endless number of fangirls and fanboys, and you join them in shouting praises of the book off the nearest rooftop. For me, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda was the latter.

The environment i was raised in was a diverse environment.The people who had shaped me

When I was much younger my Uncle Jim came out as gay. This opened my mind to a whole new world of diversity and has helped to make me the excepting person I am today. Although I am no longer a Girl Scout, starting at a young age instilled some of the great qualities of leadership and sense of self that still remain. It is slightly ironic that soccer happens to resinate as a big teaching point in my life because I only played for a small amount of time before taking up volleyball as a fall sport. However, when I started I was in 6th grade which is pretty crazy with the level of competition in sports now a days. I remember this time with great fondness and look to it for inspiration whenever I feel like I can't do something. This past summer

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapist. ...I'm not just saying Mexicans, I’m talking about people that are from all over [the world] that are killers and rapists and their coming into this country.” These are the disgusting insults that presidential candidate Donald Trump, who plans to build a massive wall around the United States, has recently scratched up to give his new modern definition of what it means to be an illegal immigrant. But despite these allegations, being an illegal immigrant has meant the same thing since the beginning of the history of the United States. An illegal immigrant is a hard working person who has no other choice but to leave the poverty stricken or hostile environment

I have noticed when I choose to only speak up about things that I think really matter, more often than not people are inclined to listen to what I have to say. When I have been in groups like this it is easy as a group to respect the opinions and values of everyone. Have you ever been in a group that experienced this kind of culture? Why do you think that not every group can be like this?

At birth, entering this new world alien, I was surrounded by the unknown, captivating, yet petrifying. This new world—a step down from the warm dark place where all you heard was a repetitive but appeasing thumping—was full of new sounds and colors. Having no knowledge about this new world forced me to learn as much as I could about the world I now inhabit. Unfortunately for my parents, I learned through destruction. Everything I acquired, I would drop in an endeavor to break it into its subcomponents. I attempted to measure how fast it would fall with nothing but a ruler and a stopwatch. I dissected objects, opened up televisions, phones, collected broken electronics, and anything that beeped or moved. I was quite the troublemaker.