This
author’s late mentor, Dr. Daniel Gallegos taught that the future American worker would need three
languages to succeed:
1-
English, the language of business.
2-
Spanish, the language that will be required due to 21st
century demographic shifts.
3-
Computer literacy, the skills and abilities to work in the information
age.
Furthermore,
he stressed the need to learn and accept diverse peoples and recognize racial
and
minority concepts that will exist in every day life from about the mid 21st century. He was, as he put it, “four
distinct kinds of Hispanic”
and he was married to a woman who was “four kinds of white.” He often
discussed the difficulty of
a mixed race marriage due to prejudice and discrimination. Even when he
worked outside in his
own yard, passers by often
thought he was the white woman’s gardener and asked
him if she would be hiring any more Hispanic help. Of course, he said that his children did not feel that they
belonged in either the
Hispanic culture or the white culture in Utah.
Dr
Gallegos was born a poor "share-croppers" son. Yet the changes of the last part of the 20th century
altered his life and his chances for success in the American Dream. Indeed, his life story is rich and he
often used his personal experiences to illustrate the difficulty for minorities to climb to the American
Dream. Even as a full tenured professor, he still faced
discrimination when he was off campus in Ogden,
Utah.
He
especially tried to help the diverse Hispanic students in his class with this true story:
When he
was very young, he was isolated from seeing any other racial groups and did not know any
skin color but brown.
He says one day he was looking across the railroad tracks and caught a glimpse of
a person who seemed very ill due to very pale skin. He ran home and asked his mother about what he
had seen. She told him that he had seen a white person, and proceeded to help him understand by telling
him this story:
“When
God created man, He had a little trouble timing His oven just right. You see, He made some
dough and formed the
shape of man, then popped him into the oven. But He took man out of the oven the
first time too early,
and man
wasn't fully cooked: those are white people my son. On the second try, He left
man in the oven too long
and burnt him: those are black people my son. But the third try He timed man just
right and brought him out a perfect ‘golden brown:’ you are that, my son.”
Dr Gallegos died at the age of 57, but left a strong legacy of truth in the celebration of diversity for his students. This
author has tried to keep that spirit alive in college classes, especially in trying to help Euro-American students to not
only tolerate diversity, but to reach out and become comfortable with it and the wonderful world it opens up.
Jesse Jackson was quoted in "Modern Maturity" (June-July 1992) as saying:
"America
is not like a blanket- one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same
size. America
is more like a quilt- many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a
common thread."
Since
most Americans still have personal issues with diversity, including gender relationships,
Seeman
and associates (2004) call for an improvement in multicultural
counseling in Counseling Psychology
Quarterly. They feel that their discipline
is in need of research and growth to be prepared to attend to the
general population which is becoming more racially and ethnically mixed.
