multiculturalism

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes _ affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism _ the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety___omen and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

When I first went to kindergarten kids asked me what I was. I did not understand-I'm a person. They explained that I look a little different and it is not as easy to tell which color I am. -Janelle from Who I Am Not What I Am, Tara Michener

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity _ of background, race, ethnicity, belief _ and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything.

Whether we consider hip-hop as an evolved manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance or something completely new under the sun, it clearly has moved beyond the stage of just entertaining lives to that of informing and empowering lives.

A different Australia emerged in the 1950s. A multicultural one, and 30 years on we're still trying to fit in as ethnics and we're still trying to fit the ethnics in as Australians.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else__ children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

Teach your children this from a very early age: "Everybody in this world is different, you're going to meet people who don't look like you, think like you, or even feel like you. This world is filled with so many different colours and shapes, so many different thoughts and feelings. You should never expect anyone else to be the same as you and you should never expect yourself to be the same as anybody else. But everyone can have so much fun learning about each other and celebrating one another" and when you are all able to do this, the world will begin to change for the better.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

Globalization is a form of artificial intelligence.

You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,' my dad said. 'Like you have left your heart behind.'He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind maybe.'What nonsense, his heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,' my mother said.'Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.' My dad never said my mother's name; she was always Begum, the generic term for 'wife'.

The moment we stop fighting for each other, that's the moment we lose our humanity.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

Where humanitysowed faith, hope, and unity, joy__ garden blossomed.