Brian Torrente

Assignment 4
09/21/14
Diversity
For a large portion of my life, I never thought too much about the concept of diversity.
Growing up, I only saw people as who they were based on their interactions with me or other
people that I knew and whether or not I liked that one person because of it. Factors such as
religion, race, or gender were just another part of what I chose to remember about people. When
looking back on my childhood, my perspective, or lack thereof, on diversity may have been
developed from various forms of media like TV shows that often teach lessons on acceptance of
people. With that being said, it is apparent that acceptance and recognition of diversity in
America is becoming more progressive and widespread across the country, at least from my
perspective.
It was not until some time into high school that the idea of diversity became a solid part
of my point of view. Concepts such as a Black Student Union, Gay-Straight Alliance, and
Diversity Assemblies pushed a point of accepting different backgrounds and types of people,
effectively burning the concept of diversity into my brain. Personally, I did not like certain points
of these concepts at school, not for any prejudicial reason, but because I preferred my way of
view diversity as just seeing people as people and have their differences just be a part of who
they are to me. From the way I saw it, those same concepts used to promote diversity just seemed
to separate the different types of people and put everyone into a classification. I chose to not care
too much about those aspects of high school life and continue practicing diversity in my own

way: by seeing everyone as just people and making judgments based on personality and nothing
else.
Alongside experiencing the pushing of diversity in high school, I also experienced
various perspectives of diversity in the world through the Internet. The expression of diversity as
seen in America, in the world, and on the Internet was much easier for me to involve myself in
than in high school. When using the Internet to catch up on news of diversity in America, the
people who make the news that are pushing diversity do not make an effort to point out their
differences, but instead work to have everyone see them as people like everybody else, as
exampled by the fight for marriage equality for the gay community. Furthermore, the websites
that I find these news posts on have a comment section, in which people all over the world give
their opinion, and it is a common occurrence that, when talking about diversity, someone says
that everyone should have the same freedoms no matter what and classifications like race,
gender, and sexuality should not be considered when giving these freedoms. However, the same
news posts make it apparent that the same acceptance and diversity does not exist everywhere in
the world, but also that there are many people in those places who fight for the same diversity
that we have here.
I have come to accept diversity as I see it and not the way it was portrayed to me in high
school. This means that I only see people as people and nothing else. However, some times come
when I dislike a person that falls under a certain classification, but at the same time, I taught
myself to recognize that not everyone under that classification is like that and just attribute it to
that one persons personality. Growing up the way I did and have the variety of friends and
experiences with different types of people has taught me to treat everyone equally on a base level
and save any judgments for after Ive gotten to know them personally.