“Cultural Acceptance”

Allfa Chen

Art of Creative Unity Award - Youth 2022 | Honorable Mention

Cultural Acceptance

White students make up 62.3% of my school population, followed by Hispanic or Latino kids at 20.0%. Black or African American students make up 6.9%. I am a part of the 6.2% of the student population as an Asian student. There's positive cross-pollination because we all get to make friends with groups of different cultures and share their different traditions and holidays. An example of this cross-pollination is when I learned about Kwanzaa. There are seven days of celebration, and you light one candle each day. In total, you have seven candles. There are seven principals for each of the seven days. The first day focuses on unity and you light up the black candle. From the second to fourth day you light the red candles. Day two is self-determination, while day three is collective work and responsibility. The fourth day is cooperative economics. Then, the next three candles are green and stand for the fifth through seventh day. The fifth day’s principle is purpose. The sixth stands for creativity, while the seventh stands for faith. This is why blending different cultures are important: you get to learn this type of information and appreciate other cultural traditions.

You also feel good being friends with people from different cultures or ethnic backgrounds because you get to interact with them. You can learn a few new words from other languages you have never heard about. Here are different languages to say hello: Bonjour, Hola, 你好 (Nǐ hǎo), Ciao, Merhaba, and Olá. I just said hello in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Italian, Turkish, and Portuguese. I had the opportunity to learn this at school from my peers. I enjoy having friends and teachers from different cultures surround me because I admire their traditions. I also got to try foods from other cultures such as pizza, pasta, sushi, tacos, and ramen.

To conclude, cross-pollination between different cultures is positive because you get to learn valuable information to better appreciate one another. If this was done globally, we could like being around each other more. There would be fewer disagreements and arguments because we would accept each other more.

Allfa Chen is a 3rd grader from Pasadena, California.