As per research reports, nearly one out of five people residing in the UK belong to the BAME Community (Black, Asian, Minority, and Ethnic) background. People from different backgrounds have settled here and are presently uprooted from their origins. Under such circumstances, BAME community youths need to make effort to know their heritage, ancestral origin, culture, and ethos. Now, why is it so? Read on to know the reasons why there is a pressing need for the BAME community to become aware of the aforesaid aspects.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR BAME YOUTH TO KNOW THEIR HERITAGE, FAMILY HISTORY, ORIGIN, CULTURE, AND ETHOS?
Character building
Learning about your heritage can help in the process of character building and enhance your life. It is extremely for the BAME community youths to have a rich heritage and still not know about it. Heritage is not just something to know about, it is also about passing it on to your future generations.
Helps in developing perspective and decision making
There is a link between the past and the future. The mixture of the decisions that you arrive at regularly along with the events that have taken place in the past will have some influence on what happens in the future. To a great extent, these decisions that are made today are shaped based on the prior understanding and awareness of what happened in the past. Becoming aware of the events of the past can provide the backdrop and conditions that BAME youths need to understand themselves better, their origin (where they came from), and develop an outlook toward life. Young people often get confused and deluded as they feel out of the way in society and find it hard to understand who they are. Learning about your heritage is certainly a great way to identify yourself and this awareness can help you embrace different positive characteristics. So, it is important to see your origin and heritage as a legacy that is of high value.
References to be drawn
In this connection, we can draw reference to other communities to seek inspiration. For example, Egyptians attempted to document their past using complicated Egyptian architecture set up to last for centuries. Again for the same reason, scripts were copied thoroughly by Jewish transcribers. Also, the Irish had bards (or wordsmiths) who were like skilled muses to memorize historical events.
Resilience
Research suggests that learning about family history helps in building resilience. Knowing about the lives of our ancestors, their struggles/failures/achievements, or triumphs to success can help you in seeing patterns and ways of overcoming adverse situations and surviving difficult times.
The United States of America celebrates October as a National Family History Month as an attempt to get familiar with one's ancestral origin and family history. It is also for the same reason of learning, registering, preserving, and sharing ancestral histories can deliver countless advantages to individuals, families, and society on the whole. It can be a strong antidote against adversative life experiences that we encounter these days, providing a stronger understanding of our origin and inspiring us to establish a deep connection with our roots.
Core Identity
Learning about our ancestral background and where we originally come from can assist in realizing who we are. The way we associate with the stories of our ancestors and develop our narrative and account about ourselves helps in establishing our exclusive and authentic identity.
Connection
A well-known British journalist Johann Hari in an admired TED talk named “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong" explained that the reverse side of addiction is not abstinence, rather it is about the establishment of the connection. Connecting and associating with family members (both past and present) and learning about their olden times. This helps in filling up an innate and inherent need in each of us.
Compassion
Knowing about the history of our predecessors also assists us in gaining a better realization of the challenges they encountered, and it time and again spurs love and compassion for their deeds, and even their faults and imperfections. This compassion and empathy can easily translate to our relations both within and outside our families.
Learning to Acknowledge Other Cultures by Recognizing Your Own
Those who operate or live around individuals from other cultures appreciate the significance of learning about the dissimilarities that surround them. However, what is often ignored is the equal importance of understanding one's own culture, morals, and beliefs to relate more effectively across different cultural lines.
By remaining unaware, we tend to view the world through a distorting screen shaped by our intensely held — every so often subconscious — values, principles, and beliefs. This reality can direct to unintended blindness and insensitivity to the values held by members of other cultures. For instance, conventional American culture admires direct eye contact. People born and brought up in this culture assume persons who do not look us in the eye are unfair, deceitful, weak, and/or ambiguous. On the other hand, the majority of Asian cultures instill the culture that evading eye contact is respectful and thoughtful. This implies an American employer is right to read an Asian-born applicant’s dropped eyes as a mark of dishonesty. To solve this problem, it is important to learn about one’s own culture as well as that of others to gain greater exposure.
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Look through our blog posts to know more about youth integration, the importance of higher education in the UK for BAME YOUTH