USA, the Melting Pot

The United States of America is a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, a land of immense diversity. People of all colors, religions, ethnic backgrounds live together peacefully, to a large extent.

In professional contexts, the diversity is mind-blowing - Project teams can often comprise of people from every continent in the world.

I have been in this country for about three years now and these are some of my observations ... Although there is excellent interaction between all kinds of people in professional contexts, most people tend to make personal friends with their own kind. White people have predominantly white friends and black people tend to stick together.

And so do the Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Hispanics and so on.

In spite of all of the attempts on the part of the university to increase diversity of campuses, the resulting diversity is only a statistic, not reality. There are white fraternities and black ones. White parties and black ones.

Diversity and acceptance of other cultures has to come from the heart and cannot be forced by affirmative hiring/admissions.

What I am really waiting for is the day they make a movie like "You've got Mail" with a black couple in the lead. Black leads, not in cop movies, action movies, horror flicks or some other special interest genre. A black couple in a regular, plain vanilla movie ... When can we see a "Sleepless in Seattle" with Halle Berry and Taye Diggs ? or Salma Hayek and Banderas ? - Where minorities come on stage as a regular couple, with regular lives ....