Beyond Our Homogeneous World

I recently attended an international conference, and nothing is more exciting than seeing the magnificent blend of the world we have become.

As I spoke to a woman from Mexico in English, a friend of hers stopped by and she spoke to her friend, in what was to my ears, perfect Chinese. She later turned to my bewildered face to say, I lived in Shanghai for 10 years of my life.

Or the young man who sounded like a mid-Westerner that I later found out was half Venezuelan, half American, raised in South American, currently living in Asia, but moving to Houston in a few weeks.

Or the older gentlemen who spoke French to the person sitting next to him, then broke into fast Spanish conversation with a work colleague about an issue, while speaking to me in English about the politics in the U.S., and later revealed that he spoke about 7 languages.

But one of the most surprising was an accent that I heard from a guy, raised in Northern and Southern California, with parents from Maine and Connecticut, who did his school in North Carolina, but now lived in Colorado but was soon moving to Asia.  He was a full blooded American that I assumed to be otherwise, simply because I could not place his accent!

The conference made me feel like we are missing out by not actively embracing our own diversity. Sometimes, our homogeneous world is America itself ~ or at least our piece of it.  Our neighborhood, our community, our group of friends.  Beyond that, the nature of our reality TV politics and government is its own vacuum.

However, outside of America, in pockets like this conference, our world is smaller and more diverse today. It will never go backwards.  The  rest of the world is migrating in that direction naturally, despite the rhetoric of politics and policy. It is inevitable.  As the only country in the world that likely has a resident from every other country in the world, America can be a natural leader in this process.

As residents, we can do our share.  We can forgo the familiar and push ourselves to interact with different people.  That difference can be cultural, geographical, socio-economic, etc.  With minimal effort, our homogeneous world can be expanded.  Such growth broadens our compassion and our understanding of a world that may be outside our “walls,” but is already inside our Facebook feed.

Take it from me, an Indian-American Jersey girl now living in Texas for the last two decades who speaks fluent English, rusty French and who could manage a fully understood, one-way conversation in Hindi, while attending a conference in Shanghai!  Diversity isn’t a goal, it is simply the modern way of life.