with white skin and brown hair and brown
eyes and when I was younger I went to
the Worthington Presbyterian Church once
a week for Sunday school because I’ve
never really found it hard to find
people who look like me or believe the
same things as me I’ve never really
thought to empathize with people who
might who might find it hard until I got
to high school where there was a huge
number of kids a huge make up of beliefs
and ideas and and face my assistant
principal knew that I was interested in
this so he sent me this map on here you
can see the native countries of students
in our school so places they either
lived in or were born in before coming
to our school we have 20 from Russia 2
from Taiwan 9 from Venezuela and this is
just so cool to me but so many countries
are represented in our school and I
think about what a map of the students
in our state or in our country would
look like and that’s just so much
representation in the beginning of the
winter in my English teacher gave us a
prompt for an essay and the question for
the essay was something like what is the
United States value more
multiculturalism or conformity and this
was difficult because I really wanted to
say the answer to this was yes the
United States values multiculturalism
over conformity it’s what we were built
upon nation of immigrants but that’s not
what I thought what I wrote because it
didn’t feel truthful and then around
Christmastime my mom showed me a letter
to the editor in the newspaper about the
war on Christmas and political
correctness and the woman who wrote it
was angry about school celebration
school concerts being changed from
Christmas oriented to a generic winter
theme and shopkeepers saying happy
holidays instead
Merry Christmas and I understood that
this woman was upset that her face was
being taken out of schools that I felt
like there was another perspective that
she wasn’t considering there are a lot
of ways to think of all the makeup of
the United States a couple weeks ago I
read an essay that you’ve been metaphor
that the United States was a spice rack
where everyone was a different spice but
we all sat on this rack together but the
most common the most accepted metaphor
usually used is a melting pot the only
thing people seem to disagree on most is
how much we’re supposed to melt so I
joked to my mom that I was going to
reply to the letter to the editor in the
newspaper and I ended up doing it the
purpose of this was to encourage the
readers of the newspaper to consider
another perspective be more empathetic
when looking at the war on Christmas
recently I’ve realized that the term
political correctness is just to
substitute for empathy that we use in
moments when we lack it or when we don’t
have any for example instead of saying
we changed the Christmas concert to a
winter concert to be more empathetic to
students and teachers who don’t
celebrate Christmas we say we did it to
be politically correct so – so to say
that we do this for appearances or we do
this to avoid conflict when it was
actually just done out of empathy I feel
proud that my school is so accepting and
so proud of the countries that make it
up in our school we have a hallway that
has flags from the different countries
that students come from in our school
hanging from the walls and that’s really
cool but there’s more that my school and
everyone else can do to make others feel
more accepted for their beliefs and
their ideas and their differences
sometimes we make judgments or
assumptions about people that we don’t
know based upon their faiths or their
ideas or their beliefs but the key to
making these people feel more accepted
in
the country is to interfere with
ourselves and the mechanism through
which we interfere with our thoughts is
empathy so the next time you come across
someone who has a belief or an idea or
faith or is just different from you I
encourage you to interfere with your own
mind and look at them with more
empathetic for you
thank you [Applause]