embracing diversity
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We may have all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now.” Undoubtedly, we still have a long way to go to truly embody this idea as a society. It will take immeasurable courage to foster a high level of empathy and inclusion, and that can only happen if we truly open our eyes to the world, accepting the facts, understanding every perspective, and exemplifying a willingness to do what is right. At the end of the day, embracing diversity is a choice that everyone must make for themselves. It’s not about showing off a persona of acceptance and understanding, it’s about embodying these values that allow you to let go of fear and hate. Hasan Minhaj said it best (see right).
By engaging in our communities and exalting diversity, we can understand and appreciate what we have while doing acting in favor of the collective good, and in today’s world, especially, it is so important to bring communities together by emphasizing our shared humanity and the common values that bind us.
I’ve come to find beauty in this.
Through Beyond Borders, I went on to meet some extraordinary people on this voyage of exploration, each of whom touched my life profoundly and uniquely through their stories. I met a German couple who had adopted a young Syrian refugee and were photographing Syria from the Israeli side of the border just so that he could see his home country growing up. A Palestinian teen who holds a camera for the first time and can’t stop looking through the pictures of his country I shot earlier that the day. A convicted felon in Colombia who served his sentence, is now a strong advocate for education, and works hard every day to help lift his small town out of poverty. A mother who was forced to float her two-old-daughter across the Rio Grande river on a raft to the US to prevent her from being kidnapped by the cartel. A border patrol agent who told me no citizen had ever stopped by to say hello to him in 20 years, given the hardly habitable terrain conditions he works in every day.
These are the people that define what a border truly is—a mesh of culture, ideas, and perspectives. These are the people that taught me what diversity truly means: an openness to new perspectives.
