Cultural
Diversity
My neighborhood has become more diverse in the last five
years because the older neighbors have died and for some unknown reason their
surviving children have chosen not to keep their parent’s homes. Ten years ago my neighborhood was African
American and now it is very mixed with a Hispanic family, one Caucasian gay
male, two Caucasian heterosexual couples, one Caucasian/Hispanic gay couple,
and one biracial heterosexual couple (African American women married to a
Caucasian male). This change is a
welcomed change but it makes me feel like I have to exert more effort in
developing neighborly relationships.
After being enrolled in this Communication and
Collaboration course I have begun to ponder on what techniques I could use to
communicate with my new neighbors. When I visited my neighbor Maria who is
Hispanic I assumed that her television would have an English speaking show on
because I thought that everybody watched English speaking shows. But when I entered
her home she was watching a show in Spanish and I sat down on the couch to
watch the show with her. I was
displaying cultural myopia when I thought that she was watching the same types
of shows that I watched, believing that everyone shared my interests (O’Hair
& Wiemann, 2012). Maria has come over to my house on several
occasions to help me with my garden or to alert me to move my car because of
street cleaning. I would like to get to know
her better and understand her life story and forge a stronger relationship.
John is a very friendly person, he is
Caucasian and his wife Jessica is
African
American and she isn’t very friendly.
They have a garden in their backyard and are very much into organic
food. Jessica seems to be very guarded
with her communication with me and I often wonder could it be a defense
mechanism because maybe she has received negative comments because of her
marital situation. I would like to get
to know her more and feel just as comfortable with her as I do with her husband
John. I guess I should work on my
self-adequacy skills and improve my communication delivery by sharing some of
my interests with her and finding out what interests she may have and what we
may have in common. Sometimes you have
to go the extra mile when trying to establish relationships and shyness is not
an asset in this case. In both of the
examples I mentioned I communicated differently because with Maria there is a
slight language barrier even though Maria makes an effort to communicate with
me in English but I know that she is making a strong effort because I hear her
speak Spanish to her family members.
Jessica has chosen not to communicate much with me so I am very careful
with the words that I use to communicate with her, but I have the faith that
things will get better. Being in a
diverse neighborhood is exciting because you can observe different cultures and
figure out how to interact with people in a positive way.
References
O'Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2012). Real communication: An
introduction. New York: Bedford/St.
Martin's.
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