On the one hand, we al give lip-service to accepting and even “celebrating” cultural differences. On the other hand, the recognition that said cultural difference don’t only manifest themselves in regional cuisines and quirky traditions people observe at home but also color every aspect of people’s behavior is just not there.
“A Hispanic woman in her 50s”, “a Russian man in his 30s”, etc. are not simply comforting statistics that will look nice and diverse on your personnel reports. They are, rather, actual universes that are governed by laws you might not even be able to imagine.
When I was learning Spanish and spending all of my time with Hispanic people, I had to learn not just the language but also the shared way of being of the people around me. And it was hard. It felt like breaking my own identity into small pieces and reassembling it anew. The process ultimately enriched me profoundly but it was very difficult and often painful.
After this experience, I never assume that people from other cultures are a sort of a version of me with a different accent. We all share a basic humanity but the ways that humanity manifests itself are profoundly disparate.
This is why “multi-culturalism” is not a happy-happy-joy-joy phenomenon but, instead, something that requires very hard work on the part of everybody. And this hard work is something that many people might simply not feel like engaging in.
So instead of saying honestly, “This is too hard, I have too much on my plate as it is, screw multi-culturalism”, people wimp out and pretend that cultural differences are simply cosmetic.
And what bugs me out of my head is seeing people who have dedicated their lives to foreign languages and literature make this mistake.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment