Culture is the shared attitudes, beliefs, attitudes, symbols, rituals, customs, behaviors, and languages unique to a specific group. According to Stuart's Hall critical theory, cultural diversity is a space of interpretative struggle (Hall, 1983). Cultural diversity denotes differences amongst people based on ethnic, racial, and cultural aspects. Ethnicity is a term used to classify people based on their culture or national origin. Race, as a part of cultural diversity, is a discursive system that hinders social mobility because it confines identities. Hall proposes cultural analysis to deconstruct how identities of class, age, gender, and race intersect dominant representations by the media (Hall 1983). According to Hall (1983), the mass media is the state's apparatus that reproduces dominant ideologies within a culture through encoding and decoding. The media plays a significant role in acculturation, which is when other cultures learn the behaviors and beliefs of the dominant culture (Liu, Liu, Garrison, Kim, Chan, Ho, & Yeung, 2019). Cultural hegemony is the ruling class's domination that manipulates culture by imposing explanations, beliefs, and perceptions. Besides, acculturation is further explained by social determinism, which is the theory that social interactions and constructs alone determine people's behavior (Liu et al., 2019). People primarily construct meaning through a predetermined universally valid culture or the ruling class's classifications, representations, and conceptual maps.
Consequently, cultural diversity is a challenge to implicit racial homogeneity due to new ethnicity entry (Meghji, 2019). The ruling class developed identities such as postcolonial, hybridity, and diaspora as confining social structures. Democratic pluralism is the myth that society is held together by standard norms such as equal opportunity and respect for diversity. However, individuals in a culturally diverse system have decoding options such as operating inside the dominant code or applying a negotiable code where consumers have specific oppositions or creating alternative truths. (Meghji, 2019).
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References
Hall. S. (1983). The formation of cultural studies. Pp. 5-24. In Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack, and Lawrence Grosssberg, Duke University press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central , Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhcl/detail.action?docID=4713552
Liu, W. M., Liu, R. Z., Garrison, Y. L., Kim, J. Y. C., Chan, L., Ho, Y., & Yeung, C. W. (2019). Racial trauma, micro-aggressions, and becoming racially innocuous: The role of acculturation and white supremacist ideology. American Psychologist , 74(1), 143. Retrieved from https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2019-01033-012.pdf
Meghji, A. (2019). Encoding and decoding black and white cultural capitals: Black middle-class experiences. Cultural Sociology , 13(1), 3-19. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1749975517741999
