Signs that DuPage County is becoming more diverse. What a funny thing to say. In fact, I'd say Naperville has been quite diverse for a number of years. I remember being in 6th grade at Washington Jr High 24 years ago and my best friends were Hispanic, Indian and Chinese... oh yea.. and there was that one "white girl" who was actually Swedish and that other "white girl" who was actually German and Italian. The real question is when will DuPage County begin showing some cultural support for all of us mixed up Americans? Those of us who are the ubiquitous mutt? We are so presumptuous about what diversity is. Especially when in fact we are all different in one way or another. How we deal with the differences and what we know about other cultures and traditions is more important than just counting how many brown skinned people there are. Being not-white myself, I find that there are so many other "not-white" people out there that need to learn just as much *tolerance* as they claim the "white" people need. But, prejudice, I can say, is still alive and well. That is one of the strange things about being “not-white” but look it. I get to hear the comments. From both sides. With regards to income and money, Naperville has many many social services where we hand out food and clothes – all very important – much of it stays in the area and provides for local low-income folks. Education, however, does seem to get left to the wayside though: Basic tutoring/quality daycare, art, music and fitness for low-income folks would be nice to see. Again, diversity is not the issue; Support for diversity. I have met some people who call themselves “professional role models” but one of them treated the low-income kids I met like they were criminals already. And those kids spoke freely about welfare checks. Some aspired to do and be something great ~ That was so uplifting and I could only encourage them to dream big! Some of them still didn’t know their colors … and, yes, I am still talking about Naperville elementary school kids. We are certainly a diverse community. What shall we do now? Can we just get over that now? How about we start addressing real issues? How about we encourage our next generation to handle that appropriately? How about encouraging kids to be multi-lingual? I’m glad this came up. And I read Heather Pfundstein’s comments about this article ~ and I was glad she cared enough to comment on it. My last thought is to her point about whether or not people want to talk about diversity. I do think that diversity is a complicated thing to talk about and it is difficult to think where one should begin: Economics? Race? Languages? Immigration? Heritage? Eye Color? But I guess we have to start somewhere.
