The workplace has been changing rapidly with people from diverse cultures represented. This necessitates the need for understanding multiculturalism as the first step to being culturally cautious and know how to interact with people. Multicultural education emphasizes a safe learning environment that guarantees safety for all students regardless of race, class or religion. This means a student does not feel threatened for belonging in a particular race but rather incorporated into education. Within a multicultural world, understanding out cultural identity and being open to other cultures is essential in the workplace. Writing the cultural autobiography allows me an opportunity to understand my deeper self and the roles that other people have played in my life. Many experiences have informed my identity in a wide variety of cultural settings. Multiculturalism also helps when interacting with other people and understand how to build successful relationships.
My family
A family is the core institution of human social existence. For many years, I never thought I would find myself miles away from my family in a completely different environment apart from the one I am accustomed to. My family origin is black belonging to African American culture from where my cultural identity stems. I was born the second and last born to my African American parents with an aspect of my identity shaped by my position in the family. My parents have modeled a lasting friendship after deciding to have a small family of two children. As the last born, I had numerous privileges and fortunes growing up including getting access to anything I wanted. I have a beautiful family and considers my parents and extended family members as gifts and treasures in my life making it attractive. They are an essential part of my life who have taught me to have a worldview that is centered on being patient, fair and flexible.
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I grew up surrounded by family members and spent most of our time together. My definition of family constitutes my parents, siblings, uncles and aunties, cousins and my grandparents. We had a tradition of spending time at my grandparent’s house during Christmas Eve, holidays, birthdays and other celebration which provided a chance to meet all of my family members. However, family unity broke up after the death of my grandparents, where we had little time to interact with each other or meet for special events. That is when I started to consider my parents and siblings as the only family. My family has reclaimed an integral part of my life and shaped my perception of diverse cultures and interacting with other people. The cultural identity that I hold as well as my parents and first teachers formed my ethnicity. Since childhood, I have been considering my father to be a true intellectual who identified strongly with the African American people. He taught me about the depths and intricacies of the African American experience and encouraged me to read about the history of African people.
I grew up in a Christian background, where drinking alcohol was forbidden, and therefore I grew up without having tasted any alcoholic drink. My parents gelded everything centered on God and were regular churchgoers, which also influenced how I grew and the decisions I have made in life. Growing up in a Christian family has contributed to my cultural identity including not looking at people based on their skin color of social class. My parents taught me about loving one another and seeing everyone as Gods creation. I remember them telling me that if I was going to consider myself a Christian, then I have to act like it through my interactions with one another. This has been crucial in the development of my cultural lens
Social class
I am an educated English-speaking citizen in the United States who was raised in a middle-class black family. My parents are fortunately together and raised me jointly along with my older brother and young sister, growing up in a beautiful home and living a typical childhood including owning pets and playing normal childhood activities such as bike riding and playing sports with neighbors. I grew up in an area between the city and country where I was fortunate to live a country life while easily enjoying city life. As a result, my siblings and I grew up away from pressures associated with living in the city in a safe and nurturing environment
My social class is an additional aspect of my cultural identity that initially affected how I viewed others in the neighborhood. I grew up as a black child in a middle-class family by both parents with my brother. I have got privileges of coming from a good family and with sufficient opportunities, enabling me to acquire education. We have a home, a safe environment and do not have to wonder where our next meal will come from due to permanent forms of employment. As a result, I faced few obstacles in getting daily needs or accessing education. While I live a life many would love to have; it is not all merry with the changing economic times. However, my generation also experiences less financial success compared to that of my parents with fewer raises, limited promotion opportunities and increased costs of living. This increases the burden of teaching our children debt-free
My parents took me to a private school for my elementary studies where I made long-life friends from regions around the world. I attended one of the top schools in the state with my parents taking me to an expensive school to receive a better education, which says a lot about white privilege and access to educational resources in the country. This was one of the hard times in my life having to deal with ostracization by peers because of my color and slightly lower social class. For the first six years of schooling, I studied with predominantly white classmates. Since I was a child, I hardly knew the differences between our races and never experienced any form of prejudice from my classmates. I never grew up hearing derogatory jokes that would make it difficult to study or interact with others. As a result, I grew up with individuals from different cultures and learned a lot about their backgrounds compared to mine.
It was not until middle school that my parents transferred me to a public school with mixed races and social class as one way of dealing with the white privilege analogy as well as giving me another life experience. Here I met children of different cultural backgrounds where all my friends were from different races and ethnicity. My transition from a predominantly white to a mixed public school was an additional turning point in my life as I moved from associating with families that had exponentially more significant amounts of money than my own to live with families of similar or lower social class.
Neighborhood
The neighborhood I grew it was a mixed-race community where there are whites, African Americans, Asians, Mexicans and Indians. Being born in this neighborhood has shaped me culturally, even more than how my family of origin could have influenced who I am today. Being in a diverse community, I have always had friends of different cultures who have influenced me enough to learn and experience lots of different cultural traditions. These experiences have helped my growth as an individual and have taught me to respect and admire other cultures. I have gained values and lessons growing through the diverse cultural neighborhood that I can carry throughout my life, including the culture experience between cultures and how to communicate with individuals outside of my culture.
Among the various aspects of my culture, my racial affiliation has been the most influential in shaping my cultural identity. I grew up surrounded by people of the same race including my grandparents who taught in me great things about being black in America and how our culture differs from others. However, growing up I became friends with people from different races and also got an opportunity to learn from their cultural perspectives about life. I always had a curiosity to know diverse people and compare them with my culture. I have also gained knowledge of who I am and my cultural background by exploring other cultures around me. The culturally rich blend of ethnicities in my composition also helped frame my identity while keeping me aware of the importance of different cultures and varieties. My friends and families come in different shades and hues, making me appreciate the diversity and complexity of different cultures and subcultures.
Strengths and Weakness of the cultural background
The benefits of being black in the United States include the necessity of looking out for each other and how this teaches one to build successful mutual relationships. We come from a culture of shared consciousness where we perceive the world and one another as an unofficial family. This explains why I quickly connected with African Americans in school as opposed to children from other cultures and ethnicities. I can give most black people that I don’t know the nod, and we will both know what it means. The necessity of looking out at each other teaches us to build successful mutual relationships.
However, there are some disadvantages of being black in America including being the unnecessary target of racial profiling by local police and being subjected to racial stereotypes rather than being considered as one of many individuals from my race. There is also the realization that I am less likely to make some money or have the same mortality rate than my white counterparts in the country when all other variables are removed. At the same, my culture is characterized by having to continually prove our humanity and navigate the structural and systemic racism. The system does not see, to work well for me with obstacles arising from being a black American when it comes to navigating the world around me.
Growing up as an African American has allowed me opportunities to understand how racial profiling and stereotypes can affect the quality of life of a person. My background has contributed to experiencing some forms of discrimination due to my skin color including stereotypes of being a black American living in diverse contexts. Growing up in a middle-class English-speaking family was a privilege in the first place. I am American to the core, including hooked up to American staples and being accustomed to the American culture all my life. However, I still have a brief circular conversation regarding my identity whenever I meet people due to the color of my skin. However, rather than the discrimination holding me back, I found them empowering as they drive me to do the impossible and prove my worthy among those who may underestimate me. I would speak to my family about the conversations that people have regarding my skin color, and we would laugh about all the assumptions that people make regarding our culture.
Sexual orientation
I am heterosexual and married to a partner of the same race with two sons and a daughter. Growing up in a Christian background guided my sexual orientation and who I turned out to be today. I was taught the importance of having one man married to a woman as a wife. However, a study on multiculturalism has changed my views on sexual orientation against discriminating them. I believe a person can be allowed to be who they want to be to accommodate diversity and let them live their lives. I cannot imagine what it feels to be sidelined due to the inherent characteristics such as choice of lifestyle.
How cultural identity has shaped my worldview
In essence, the family is one way of passing cultures from one generation to another and contributes to sustaining a specific. At the same time, we tend to learn and develop within specific cultural contexts including how an individual interacts with others. Living within my neighborhood has also taught me that there are other ways of looking at the world except for a single cultural lens. Every culture tends to have their way of looking around the world that is different from another, and understanding this diversity provides an opportunity to communicate with some awareness and avoid related conflicts. The culture of a person can affect their behavior in the workplace based on how they speak and interact with others. I have learned to be aware of cultural differences as one way of avoiding conflicts related to diversity.
I believe my upbringing has been beneficial in how I turned out and the way I developed as an adult. Despite growing up in a middle-class family, I was exposed to enough hardship and experienced differences that taught me about being empathetic and understanding individualism. I know the importance of valuing and exemplifying our differences in race, class, religion as well as sexual orientation without having to judge someone or prejudice them. The difference is needed to make the world a better place and make us uniquely human.
Growing up, I interacted with a lot of children from high-class families and had somehow negative experiences with them due to their mean, rude and insincere nature. Some of them were spoiled and rotten that they had a habit of judging lower class children based on how they look or their intellectual abilities. They didn’t care about the obstacles of growing up in low-class families and how it could affect their studies. This negative experience made me realize the importance of respecting each other regardless of our social class or race and guided by upbringing.
I believe multicultural education within a classroom entails an emphasize on a safe learning environment. This means students with a different race, religion, class or sexual orientation should be incorporated into the school. Multiculturalism can also be applied in the workplace when interacting with people from different backgrounds. I have since learned the importance of collaborating with others and appreciating multicultural interactions from the experiences I had growing up. The world has also taught me valuable lessons about my identity and respecting the culture of others.
As a citizen from a multicultural neighborhood, I have to be aware of my cultural lens that has shaped who I am today. The cultural lens directly impacts how I see the world, and I have to be cautious about what I think about other people. I have learned never to judge people based on class since no one chooses to be in their current state. My parents showed me that not everyone was born with the same opportunities and we ought to work hard and achieve our dreams. Their philosophy was that the content of a person matters more than their skin color or amount in their pocket since race does depict the character of a person and whether they are kind or worthy. This helped me when I was growing up, as I developed a mindset that does not look at a person based on their physical characteristics, but based on their inherent values. My parents also influenced my level of tolerance for cultural differences in a person and how to interact with anyone and everyone.
