Is irritability of cultural differences a part of human feelings?
Cultural understanding/awareness is feeling, experiencing, noticing, or even knowing about the beliefs, customs, and arts of a people outside your local or native community. There are four stages of cultural awareness as I have;
Friday September 29, 2017 , 2 min Read
Well, there are lots of things people get irritated about and other people's way of life is one of them. But are we supposed to overcome them, I mean grow past them or pride in them.
Cultural understanding/awareness is feeling, experiencing, noticing, or even knowing about the beliefs, customs, and arts of a people outside your local or native community. There are four stages of cultural awareness as I have;
1. 1ST STAGE: at first, one knows and believes only in the perfect existence of his culture, and finds it difficult to accept another.
2. 2ND STAGE: at this stage, one knows about the culture of other people, but still believes that his is the perfect one.
3. 3RD STAGE: here, one gradually begins to accept the culture of others, seeing its beauty, appreciating it, and using such cultural diversities to create solutions which makes for easier collaboration.
4. 4TH STAGE: people who are well advanced in the third stage, though of diverse cultures, come together to cultivate those into one for the innovation of a more suitable, general and appreciable culture.
These are the stages each and every one pass through before attaining cultural understanding.
You see, it is definitely not that easy. It takes a whole lot of tolerance, Education of the mind, discipline, and so on. It is a deliberate and intentional act.
Unfortunately, I have observed that only a handful of Indians, are ready to embrace cultural understanding. I have seen people laugh when an African dresses traditionally. To be honest, I have found some traditional dress styles of Indians really ridiculous sometimes. But do we go ahead and appreciate this things in a matured manner or do we keep to ourselves what we feel which hurt others or make them feel uncomfortable?
A larger percent of Indians are still on the first stage of cultural understanding, and there is visibly no readiness to make it better. This has to get better because it is one of the major things which make them treat African Foreigners like unholy and different, and this begins with Government authorities.
Everyone of us need to embrace cultural understanding. We need to! Irritability of cultural differences may be a part of human feelings, but we cannot afford to nurture these feelings.
Be ye African.
Be ye Indian.
We've got to change lens.
#AfricanahIndiana👓