Multiculturalism 101

My daughter just finished university. She’s a music teacher. She starts working full time in the Fall but for May and June she’s picking up experience (and some extra cash) by working as a substitute teacher in the Winnipeg 1 school division.

Winnipeg 1 is the largest school division in the city and probably the most challenging. It includes Winnipeg’s inner city and, if you believe the headlines, the inner city is not a great place to live or work. Gang violence, murder, drugs…. according to the papers and TV newscasts, the inner city is one big adventure in taking your life in your hands.

Could it be that the news reports tend to focus on the negative and sensationalize the bad things that happen? Is that possible? They wouldn’t do that, would they? Based on what I saw yesterday, perhaps we shouldn’t be attaching as much credence to the headlines as we often do.

My daughter taught at an inner city school yesterday. She is not comfortable driving in the inner city (yet). It gets pretty silly in rush hour. So I agreed to drive her and pick her up. And I'm really glad I did. My wife and I sat in front of the school for a few minutes after we dropped her off and again when we came to pick her up and just watched the people. Talk about your cross-section of humanity! Skin colour? Everything from peaches and cream to deep, dark ebony. Cultural affiliations? There were young Arab girls and their mothers wearing hijabs. There were African women wearing colourful kangas. Oriental, Filipino, you name it. It was like a little United Nations wrapped up in one elementary school.

But here’s what really struck me. These people were happy and comfortable in their environment. They were smiling – the children, their parents – all of them. And the children all played together. There were no cultural boundaries – no ethnicities sticking to themselves to the exclusion of others. None of that! There seemed to be no notice given to what people were wearing, where they originally came from or what they looked like. They were just kids playing together, parents talking to one another, and they all got along just fine.

My daughter noticed it in the classroom, too. The kids were so happy to be there. Many of them were recent immigrants to Canada and they appreciated the opportunity just to go to school and get an education. There was no “Do I have to?” “I don’t want to be here.” No pouty lips or sad eyes. They were glad to be there and it showed in their shiny, smiling faces. My daughter was beaming when she came out of the school to meet us at the end of the day. She was overflowing with stories of how cute the kids were, how nice they were to her and how much they seemed to care for one another and for their substitute teacher. The school did its part, too. They really encouraged tolerance and understanding. And it was working.

It is commonly accepted that bigotry and hatred are not natural but, rather, are learned behaviors. That certainly seems to be true based on what I saw yesterday. As we were driving away at the end of the school day, it got me thinking about how insular we sometimes are. How, as adults, we either consciously or unconsciously tend to “stick with our own kind” and how narrow and closed-minded that is. There is incredible diversity in this world and we miss out on so much of it by doing that. These were people who had come from all over the world to be here. Skin colour, religion, choice of attire, cultural background, beliefs…. they ran the gamut in this community but none of it mattered in any substantive way. None of them had turned their backs on their cultural histories. Quite the opposite. They openly embraced them. But they did it in an open, welcoming, non-judgmental way and everybody accepted everybody else just as they were. It’s not the kind of subject matter that they write newspaper articles about. And that’s too bad. We could all learn a lot.

I couldn’t help thinking that, if everyone had this kind of experience during their formative years, there would be a lot less hatred in this world, a lot more understanding and acceptance and maybe, just maybe, terrorism might become a thing of the past.

If the people of this inner city community can do it, why can’t we all? Maybe I’m just dreaming. But it’s a really nice dream.