This spring break, our family did not have any ambitions plans for the week. Mostly it’s just me and the kids at home, venturing out whenever there’s a break between spring weather patterns. Additionally, I had some grading to catch up on too.
I am currently teaching a course on Race & Ethnic studies, focusing on the different minority groups within the United States. The big project I’m looking at this week is timelines. Each student picked a minority group to focus on and built out a timeline of significant events within their group’s experiences. A lot of them are hard histories with terrible laws and heartbreaking conflicts. Each group had to get recognized for voting rights and fair treatment. Some had to overcome slavery and discriminatory pay. Others had to fight for the right to marry, to farm and even to speak their own languages.
The benefit from all of this is for everyone. We can all grow from the gifts that each group possesses, from music and art, to humor, poetry and literature. Each group has contributed to invention, medicine, architecture and agriculture.
As the instructor, I am lucky to see all of this, but the raw information is available to everyone at any given time. It’s not like when I was in college and you had to go bury yourself in the stacks of a university library. All this information now lives on the Internet, and is easily accessible if you have a computer or a smart phone. It also exists in our communities.
You don’t have to book an airline flight to get a cross-cultural experience. It’s all right here. Instead of just going to the places you’re used to, why not venture out to a shop, or a restaurant a little different than where you’ve been before. My daughter went to Uwajimaya (a Japanese grocery store) for the first time recently and made her own bento box. We have several Mexican grocery stores nearby and a Taiwanese bubble tea place a couple blocks away. We visit, not just to consume, but also to interact with the people that work there. There are three generations working at the bubble tea place: an older gentleman, his daughter, and his granddaughter. My daughters enjoy seeing them, and they enjoyed seeing my daughters. We have a window to the whole world right here at home.
