The International Institute’s Festival of Nations brought 42 food booths and a World Bazaar featuring 37 nations to St. Louis this past weekend. The number of different accents and shades of skin present, however, were approximately countless.
After 12 years, the Festival is still a mélange of sounds, tastes, sights and vibrations from Japanese taiko drums. All this, combined with the constant stimulation from seeing the unfamiliar, makes the overall experience culturally exhausting.
When you return from the festival, your feet may have been aching, a natural aftermath of walking in the heat. You may have been dehydrated, or feeling guilty that you had to buy water. But the stimulating multicultural environment probably left you with a more noticeable feeling of diversity.
Congratulations. Now you can go home and feel more open-minded. Chances are that when you came back to the University, you huddled in your old cliques, looked for people that look like you to make new friends and probably made a remark or two about how there are so many Asian students again this year.
It’s inevitable. By nature, we are attracted toward, and feel more comfortable making friends with, people as close to us in culture and physiology as possible. It is no surprise that some of your friends may pass as your brother or sister.
And I don’t know a soul who would intentionally induce discomfort in himself or herself on the first day of school. It’s already stressful as it is. I won’t blame you if you haven’t picked up a new foreign exchange friend.
As I was looking through the Festival of Nations program booklet, however, I found a very inspiring quote in an advertisement. This is funny, because usually inspiring and advertisements do not appear in the same sentence together. The slogan read:
“When we invest in diversity, we invest in a stronger, better, more beautiful St. Louis.” Besides being profound and optimistic, this gives us a new way to look at investments.
In finance, when you invest in something, you have proof that you will gain benefits in return; otherwise, it’s called gambling. Of course, you wouldn’t gamble, nor invest with something as abstract as diversity. And what does it mean to be multicultural?
The city of St. Louis has a great reputation in diversity, though not so much in inclusion. In the nooks and crannies of the city, you can find cultural clusters of Bosnians, Chinese, Italians and Afghans.
At Saint Louis University, this diversity can be seen in more or less the same proportions, be it in culture, religion or ideology. Embracing this diversity, however, often remains as abstract as the concept itself.
Maybe this is because we invest too much in diversity and not enough in similarity and inclusion, in finding the things that make us all human. Diversity, this desirable concept, gets lost in oaths of inclusion and rallies to end racism. In everyday life, however, all oaths of inclusion are forgotten.
Things as trivial as a smile are easy places to start. When you smile at a person you know is very different from you, that elicits a stretch of facial muscles similar to yours. Immediately, ties of similarity are bound. Inclusion begins with a smile.
Or you can begin by starting a conversation. If an accent is hard to decipher, make the effort to understand it. Practice makes perfect. Doing this, however, begins by believing at heart that varieties in speech, belief or appearance are no reason for distance.
Parisa Rouie is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
