Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

For this week's assignment, we had to reach out to people that we know and see how they define culture, as well as their own culture. Many of the friends I talked to both different the same race or ethnicity, answered the question needing a little more clarification as to what exactly I meant.

One of my people are asian descent and from the country of Laos.  I asked her what does culture mean to you? Said, "what do you mean like where I'm from?" I then, responded in way, but also things that are common among people of your kind and and any values that kind of define who you are and what your family views as typical depending on your age, sex race, ya know things like that. She proceeded to tell me that, Oh yea, well I am from the country of Laos although most of my family is in Florida, I am Asian and a U.S. citizen, I have a bilingual family with three children, I am a stay at home mom, and wife. It is they way that my culture would prefer it be but I refuse to have anyone other than family watch my kids anyways." this is just an excerpt of how the discussion went. From the little that I did post, One can gather information about the my friend and her values, she basically told me what her family beliefs are which something that we look at as a shallow culture. People sometimes tend to just skim the surface. The other two that I had spoken with, said basically the same thing. Culture meant things to them like, holidays, certain foods that I may eat different from you, the things my family and I believe in and race. I'd say this was something mentioned throughout all of the readings that we have had thus far in the class.

Some of the things that were not mentioned were, things like housing arrangement and class, most others were hit except those that describe monetary standards.  They tend to think that a very successful personal they picture as a white businessman with at least two children with a stay at home wife and a six figure salary i.e. the dominant culture. That had no idea that they had brought in the monetary standing as far as culture.