Cultural Awareness

Fortunately for everybody my entry this week is probably going to be a bit shorter than my average one, since this is probably the busiest week of the semester for me so far.
Yesterday in class we talked about cultural awareness and cultural diversity primarily. Reading the article Ali and Heath assigned and doing the worksheet at the end of class made something a lot more salient to me...when I looked around the classroom everybody was white, the majority of the other Cyclone Aides this year are white, everybody on my conference bid team is white, and most of the people I know on IRHA is white as well. Although it's very easy to see that the majority of people in leadership positions here are white, it's not really that easy to be consciously aware of it, which I became yesterday. It was actually kind of shocking.
The article also talked about becoming aware of our biases and how it effects the way we interact with other people. It's impossible to deny the fact that one has biases...they will be there, but the important thing is to acknowledge how they effect your interactions with others. There is actually a video I remember watching in Social Psychology last year that still sticks with me. Basically two confederates were trained to act the same, having the exact same professional credentials and pretty much everything the same about their personality...but there was only one difference...one person was attractive, the other person was more average looking. Although professionally they were still the same potential employers almost always hired the more attractive applicant. This just goes to show that biases for attractiveness really do effect big issues such as employment, and that can be translated to race as well. White people are encouraged to seek positions of power more and so they are more likely to be in positions of power, and due to us being a white-priveledged culture, they will most likely get the preference for the position opposed to somebody of a different race. People of other races are oftentimes molded into just trying to fit in with our culture that they won't try to obtain positions of power and thus aren't seen in higher positions as often and make less money. Again, these were all issues I knew about, but it is something that can be difficult to acknowledge when one wants to think of the just-world notion in order to protect your conscience.
Even when I was doing Team Leader interviews for Destination Iowa State before class yesterday, the majority of the applicants were white, with only two other ethnicities being represented, Hispanic and Asian. I was only in one interview room though ofcourse, so maybe there were others there as well, but based just off of my sample room, there wasn't too much cultural diversity represented.
I honestly don't know what we can do as a solution to this, either than just acknowledge that fact and that our biases can effect our interactions. Acknowledging it is probably the first step to finding a solution though.
I think I'll end the entry here. I don't really have much else to say this week. I hope everybody has a good weekend and stay safe!