Video Transcription

CULTURAL DIVERSITY: How can I celebrate my friends?

Turning up to school every day can get so tough. There’s so much to keep up with, and there’s so much pressure to fit in. Totally. Everyone just wants to be normal, right? Not stand out too much, and just do what everyone else gets to do. However, when students have parents or families that have grown up in different countries or have different cultural backgrounds, their views and values can be different from home to school.

Yeah, for sure. I used to get teased for not being able to stay out as late as everyone else or wear the same things as everyone else. And my friends with more traditional parents or different cultural backgrounds copped a lot more than me. I’d hear questions like, “Why don’t you hang out with the other kids who look like you?” or “Why do the kids in the same cultural background all hang out together?” These are really intense questions to get when you’re just trying to be at school.

Those little questions or comments just dig into your heart. Yeah, and like, they’re not trying to be mean, but these kinds of questions can make you feel like a nobody or an outsider. It’s plain boring because it happens all the time, right? Yeah, it’s questions like, “Where are you from?” or even, “Oh, which Asian country are you from?” or, “Does it matter? They all look the same.” Or, “Why does your lunch smell like that?” Like, you’re done.

So what can we do to support people who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds? Well, we can throw the idea of “normal” in the bin. Just because the majority of people look a certain way or do certain things, that’s just one way. If someone’s from a different religious background or has different cultural practices, that’s an awesome opportunity to get to know them and celebrate diversity.

Go easy on the questions. Sometimes, when people come from what we don’t consider a typical family background or a typical culture, they might get bombarded with questions. Yeah, totally. I remember when I met a Muslim friend in high school for the first time. I was so curious about how she lived her life, but I didn’t want to make our whole friendship about her explaining her existence to me. So I would ask questions now and then without putting pressure on her to answer them. It took a while to get used to things, like she doesn’t eat pork, and I kept offering her bacon because I kept forgetting! But you get used to it and just realize that different people do things differently.

Invite others to join in, and don’t put them in a box. Yeah, and there are heaps of people who speak English as a second language. It’s important to not just assume that people who speak the same language stick together, that they’re not good at school, or that they don’t want to make new friends.

Now, imagine that you’re going to a new school for the first time. It’s daunting already, right? But then everyone speaks a different language from you, looks different as well, and is into different things. It’s pretty intense, right? So challenge yourself to be that person who makes people feel welcomed by smiling at them when they walk past or getting to know something about them that nobody else knows.

Totally. I wish someone had told me these tips when I was at school, because it can be such an easy issue to just push to the back of your mind and gloss over. Yeah, it totally matters. Diversity is something worth being talked about, so let’s just keep the conversation rolling.

Video by Project Rockit