Understanding another cultures breaks racial barriers

In a school where so many cultures interact peacefully, I find it hard to grasp the idea of racial tensions. The number of people of different cultures that I interact with during the day doesn’t even cross my mind. In fact, the idea of San Jose, a city so close to us, having racial tensions quite surprised me.

From what we can see in history, there are very few people who willingly change their own view of a stereotype by themselves.  It’s because these changes break down whatever preconceptions people have and force them to build another image of others from scratch — a process that requires courage and effort.

So, I applaud those Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants who met on Sunday, Nov. 15, in San Jose, who worked toward breaking that culture gap. A group of approximately thirty immigrants were invited by two grass-roots organizations to break down the cultural barrier in order to avoid racial tension. What the participants found was not only an understanding of each others culture, but also similar problems and goals that both the Asians and Latinos were solving and working toward. 

“Is it true that you eat dogs?” “Why are Mexicans so loud and noisy?” 

Both are questions that under normal circumstances would have offended many people. In this meeting, both questions were starting points for another culture to dispel certain myths about themselves.

What if there were more places that people could bond with others of a different culture and dispel negative representations about themselves? To us, the naiveté and ignorance in the questions are almost laughable; the questions themselves reveal an ignorance of another culture. 

And so I respect these people who are willing to work toward understanding another despite their reluctance to interact another culture.  

“We don’t think we’re better than you, and we’re here to stay, to punch through those walls between us,”  15 year old participant America Barcenas said.

And so I hope that those walls of cultural barriers and stereotypes will be punched through and crumbled into dust.