.8 Changing Philosophies in Multicultural America

Your personal philosophy does have a tremendous impact. We can all work together with different Philosophies, but the philosophy we have, will really influence and impact the way we go about what we do and our motivation for doing it. We should try to understand other peoples' motivation, why they do what they do. It's probably very hard for you to identify with my world because a few weeks before I wrote this I was in Zululand watching bare-breasted native's dance. That is a world that is very far away from the world of Norfolk, Virginia. But this is the world of traditional Zulu society in Southern Africa. This is a very real world for me, and you have a link to that world through me. So we are all linked together.

Now that world and those complex differences require us to have a different level of understanding than we did before. If you grew up in a homogeneous community, and we still have vestiges of that and there are still people who try to recreate that by retreating to a little suburb here or there, you get to a point where all the people are alike. You don't have to go back very long in Massachusetts. Cape Cod is a resort area, the escape area from Boston. Fifty years ago on Cape Cod they had the Jewish community, they had the Catholic community, and they had the Protestant community. If you went to Cape Cod in the summer time and you were Jewish, you'd go to the Jewish community and other people were not welcome. If you went to the Catholic recreation area, other people were not welcome. People who were alike got together and that was it that was their
world. But these days that doesn't work anymore. We don't have those neat little separations. We all have to somehow learn to interact with each other and our choice is to either embrace that or resent it, but that is the way it is whether we like it or not. The reality of who we are is a complex, multicultural world. If we go about it in the right way, we can make that and advantage in the world rather than a disadvantage.

The United States is the most diverse nation on the face of the earth. We all are Americans of all sizes and shapes, colors, and religious orientations. We are all here together and to make that the strength that it really is, is our challenge. Teachers are the first lines of that challenge. If teachers still believe that the world is somehow going to return to this nice little neatly categorized world somewhere, then teachers are the enemy as far as I'm concerned. No longer is society willing to say it's okay to be racist. There are still a lot of racist folks around, but it is not okay. More importantly, all of us are racist to some extent. We haven't really learned how to live together and we are racist whether we are black, white, or whatever. We all have inappropriate reactions based on our own heritage and we are all having to learn how to deal with that. But we are making progress and at least the official position of the society no longer endorses that. In the past it did, but no longer. Now teachers are in the position of really helping to change that and help consolidate it. And your philosophical position is one of the things that will influence the way you go about that.

	What should be a teacher's position when dealing with racism?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Barlow teaches in a high school whose population ratio is 70% African-American, 25% white, and 5% Hispanic. If racial issues should occur within her classroom, how should she handle them, and, ultimately, avoid them in the future?	Answer Here