Diversity and Culture

When I first stepped foot on the Stout campus, I had a grand idea of organizing a cultural festival. One that would celebrate people from all cultures, from all across the globe. One that would highlight many cultures with music, dance, and art. In the first semester of my undergraduate career, I convened a cultural festival task force and gave many presentations of this idea to the dean of students, provost, and many faculty and staff members who were involved with all things "diversity" on the campus. While the idea of having a cultural festival was well-received and many people expressed support for the planning of the festival, there were many hurdles to overcome. How would we host such a festival and, more importantly, how do we answer those who are questioning the importance of having a cultural festival; WHY do we want one? DO we need one?

As the days and months progressed, the hurdles piled; we needed funding, we needed endorsement, we needed a bigger task force, we needed to have a clearer vision, we needed dedicated members across campus to be involved, we needed ... etc, etc. Months turned into semesters, semesters turned into years. And although the planning strategies were adjusted every year, when my senior year rolled around it seemed as if we were still at square one. At the time, I thought the students needed this; the students needed this.

In a largely homogenous campus, where teaching diversity included tactics such as convening multicultural students into panels and having those students talk about their experiences as being a student of color on a white campus, the students needed this.

In a largely homogenous campus, where Hmong students received random messages from white students (because their names "seemed Hmong") asking about their personal experiences as refugees, the students needed this.

In an overwhelmingly homogeneously white campus where I have been told that the only two Asian ethnicities are Chinese and Japanese -- I thought that the students really needed this.

However, when I reflect back to my thoughts and assumptions surrounding the cultural festival initiative I can now understand why such a festival was never accomplished.

If we wanted to make a long-lasting impression on the campus and community members about the importance of creating, nurturing, and fostering an environment of diversity, this was not the best way to do so. If we wanted to spread messages of acceptance, inclusivity, and tolerance, this was definitely not the most effective way.

At one point, it was expressed to me that the students may not want this. In retrospect, I don't think the student body would have seen to the full depth and scope of the cultural festival, if it had seen fruition.

Last year, I was at a symposium about the teaching of diversity and inclusivity. One of the speakers said something that deeply resonated with me, particularly in regard to my experiences with the planning of the cultural festival. I believe that a cultural festival would have functioned as an "uncritical and superficial recognition of differences where diversity becomes little more than makeup ... [and] token programs." In the last few years, these questions have occupied most of my "free time" - why couldn't we bring the festival to fruition? What are some of the underlying, unobservable, and unexamined possibilities that we should have considered?

What we should have considered, is that "diversity" is a multifaceted, at times "fluid," concept that encompasses a plethora of ideas "other" than what is unquestioningly accepted as the norm in this society. Diversity is about  more than showing students the dances of different ethnic groups. It's about inspiring a consciousness that involves more than what meets the eye: "this is representative of (insert culture) dancing, yes. But this does not define that culture and is not all there is to the culture" etc.

What we should have considered, is that "culture" (what was used simultaneously and interchangeably by some students on the campus as colloquialism for "something only ethnic minorities have") is so commonly misunderstood and imperceptibly complex that to capture it in a short-lived festival would have been the equivalent of placing a band-aid over the persisting problems related to diversity and culture.

In the last decade of my life, I have struggled to define and redefine diversity and culture. I read a research article about the Self and Culture (Markus and Kitayama, 2010) where they wrote about culture in a way that resulted in my immediate "YES!" Although this was written in the context of cultural psychological research, I think it captured key concepts of what I now see as "culture". They wrote:

"Culture is not a stable set of beliefs or values that reside inside people. Instead, culture is located in the world, in patterns of ideas, practices, institutions, products, and artifacts [...] with this definition, the emphasis in the study of culture [...] is not on studying culture as collections of people – the Japanese, the Americans, the Whites, the Latinos – but is instead on how psychological processes may be implicitly and explicitly shaped by the worlds, contexts, or sociocultural systems that people inhabit.”

I've always believed that education was the key to everything. If you teach people about cultures and diversity, they will know. And hopefully curiosity, acceptance, and respect ensues. But through my journey, I've come to really understand and appreciate the lessons of experience; those of which cannot be taught through formal education but only through living, listening, and reflecting. The cultural festival would have allowed us an easy way to put ethnic cultures on display for many students. But I think that would have distracted the very same students from diving deeper into a culture and seeing its' diversity.

Not too long ago, I was asked once again "what is Hmong?", followed by "what is Hmong culture like?" As a self-declared expert of my people and history, I was about to embark on my ready-made spiel when I stopped to think - wait, what ideas am I perpetuating by repeating the words of my well-researched and well-rehearsed response? I can say that the Hmong are a minority group, indigenous to China. But is that true? So much of our history is lost in the folds of time. I can say that Hmong culture is about community and clan membership, is embedded in our paj ntaub, is carried in the notes of our queej - but is that all? (Besides, how many people will know or understand paj ntaub and queej?) What about the culture we have created today? That has to count. And so in that moment, I answered "The Hmong are an ethnic minority group living here in the United States of America. Our culture, like yours, is ever-changing and always growing."

There are many things about my undergraduate years that I miss deeply: Monday HSSO executive board meetings, Tuesday SSA meetings, the many potlucks I attended, those late nights doing homework with friends, making random trips to ERP, dancing with Yeej Zoo, and laughing with all my amazing friends and colleagues. So looking back, it's okay that the cultural festival did not happen - because many other wonderful things happened during those times. Perhaps this is another great lesson of diversity; I put so much energy into a cultural festival at that time, that I forgot to count all the diverse activities around me.

Since the time of the cultural festival planning to now, my greatest truth lies in that I must be comfortable with the amorphous concepts of "diversity" and "culture" as well as their numerous manifestations. I used to be so disappointed in myself for not being able to find a way to make the cultural festival happen. However, when I look back, I think we did the best that we could. The great beauty of it all was that many dedicated individuals joined in on the journey toward a cultural festival; that at one point, we all joined hands to support an idea. Isn't this usually how movements start? :)

Maybe now, all the brave supporters of the cultural festival initiative are living and enjoying the cultural festivals of their respective lives, and realizing how much diversity and culture we have around us. Maybe the goal of the cultural festival has been achieved, after all.