Race and My Community

Race and My Community

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Race and My Community

Throughout this class we have learned about many different cultures and many religions. Some of the cultures I have learned valuable information about, and there are other cultures that has peeked my interest. When we talk about cultural diversity in our community there is one major group that stands out in my mind, and it is not a group that is covered in this class. They tend to stay to themselves, very religious, and extremely family oriented. They are the largest diversity group that we have in the area, they are the Amish.

The community that I call home is a little town called Highland, Minnesota. The population in this quiet, very serine town is about 50 or so. In light of this fact I have chosen to consider the entire Fillmore County as my community. The population of Fillmore County is 96,975 as of 2009. 98.7% of the population is white, whereas the other largest group is Hispanic/Latinos with .08% of the population, then fallows African American with .04%, Asian Americans at .02%, and Native Americans at .01% (US Census Bureau, 2010). Another group that I want to address also; however, the statistics are for the whole state of Minnesota. The Amish have a population in Minnesota of 2835 and have 12 different settlements with 21 church districts (Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, 2010). Although in our area none of the groups appear to live in "mini-communities." They are equally dispersed throughout the county. Then group that I belong to would be the white, as do about 98% of my community, and as I walk around in our little town and the neighboring towns I can honestly say that I so not see any difference in the way that people treat each other. There definitely seems to be a genuine sense of welcome and hospitality.

When I look around where I live I see that there are many challenges that one would have to overcome, however I don't see that any of them would have to do with the color of their skin or the religion that they choose to practice. The struggles that everyone seems to be are those of everyday life. I cannot attest to the nature of whether or not any of the other races and religions is feeling like they are being singles out or oppressed in any way. Changing any kind of injustices would have to start with education. Knowing and understanding a religion or culture would almost always need to be the first step. The newspapers, from what I see, are non-bias. They seem to cover all news equally. In our local newspaper the only headline that is posted explains how a foreign exchange student is dealing with the change of living in Hamburg, Germany with a population of about eight million, to living in a small Minnesota community (Lovejoy, 2010).

When it comes to looking at the cultural make up of my work environment, I have to say that at this time I am unemployed. However, I started to thinking about it and I decided to talk to my husband about this topic. The company that he works for employees a large number of people from all walks of life. In discussing with him the various aspects of the company, he works for I found that they do not have any type of diversity training, but seem to have no problem in the way that any of the staff are treated. It is a "union shop" so the enforcement and implementation of company policy is very standard. They do have a very strict discrimination policy and they also have an "AlertLine" setup to field any such violations. I do believe that people can always strive to be better, but at this point I am not sure what his company could do better to support diversity in the workplace.

Our town does not have a Mayor or a city council, so I will look at the county officials. All of the county officials that I have researched appear to be white so it is hard to say if the interests of other races are being represented in our community. I only have lived here for a short time so to say how the people are being represented would not be a fair portrayal of our community. I was able to interview a local nurse. She had some very interesting answers to the questions that I posed to her. When asked about what she thought were the two most important issues facing minorities, she responded with "The ability to communicate with the outside world" and "People not understanding their customs and culture." When I asked how she would propose to resolve these issues, she stated that "...more educational programs should be offered" and "People need to be educated on the different forms of culture and need to work on their tolerance of other people and traditions" (Kirk, 2010).

When I questioned