19.

Multicultural Society
Many people are proud of saying that they are not racists but in reality they have never lived with people of a different colour next door. In world history there are many examples of excellent cooperation of people of different nationalities, different races or religious beliefs. People are naturally divided according to the colour of their skin, the type of hair they have, the shape of their faces, etc. but we cannot judge people by these features and we have to try to bring people of different races together so that they live and work peacefully together. Many governments have passed a law to promote racial integration in schools or at work and they support the integration of other ethnic groups into society. There are many big cities which are cosmopolitan such as London where the British from different parts of the country searching for jobs have settled down next door to Pakistanis or West Indians. Their children attend the same schools and grow up shoulder to shoulder. New York is as cosmopolitan as London but is not as mi xed. Nationalities stay in their own areas, like the Russians in the Russian section, the Germans in the German section. Polish people settled down in a cosmopolitan district of Chicago.

The area of a city where many Chinese people live and where you can find many Chinese shops and restaurants is called Chinatown. In cities such as San Fransisco, New York and London the Chinatown street signs are in Chinese as well as English. People of different nationalities have different cultures. In some countries marriages are arranged and young people have to marry the partner chosen by their parents. In different religions different approaches to lifestyles, marriages and equality between men and women are accepted. Mixed marriages are becoming more and more commoplace in many countries. Since 1989 Slovakia has become a country open to people from other countries. Apart from Slovaks, the territory is inhabited by over half a million Hungarians in the south of Slovakia, along with smaller groups like the Ruthenians in the east. One minority without a territory are the Romany. A rapidly rising birth rate among the Romany means an increasingly important issue in Slovak politics and Slovakia is working hard to integrate them into society. At present the country faces the problem of Vietnamese guest workers and helps the refugees from Albania and Ukraine to continue their immigration process in newly built asylum houses.

A new phenomenon has appeared in Slovak traditions. More and more women get married to men of different religion and colour. There is still a certain amount of prejudice, but most young people are tolerant, without any prejudice. There are many benefits to a society which is truly multicultural. It enriches people offering them different experiences, different ideas, different attitudes to life and supports tolerance and mutual understanding. There is no place for segregation which encourages racial tensions and hatred. Ethnic unrest between groups of people of different race, or with different customs, living in the same place, especially when one group is smaller than the other makes people fight and kill each other. A unified Europe, multicultural America and different integration processes support the idea of co-existence side by side, understanding each other's customs and traditions, tolerating different attitudes, accepting different lifestyles, sharing our cultures to secure a happy and confident life for future generation.

Vocabulary

Religious belief -vierovyznanie to promote podpori commonplace - ben jav mutual vzajomn co-existence spoluitie secure - zabezpeci

judge - posudzova to be arranged - by dohodnut, dohovoren prejudice - predsudok tension naptie share - deli sa o nieo

Post-reading activity
1 Do you think that your family are tolerant enough to other cultures and their customs? 2 What would your parents think if you wanted to marry a person of a completely different culture or religious belief? 3 In what ways have you seen people judge others by the colour of their skin? 4 What possible problems can appear in a family of different races or religious beliefs?

Reading
Read the following article about immigration and decide whether the statements below the
text are true (T) or false (F). Support your decision by choosing the paragraph in which you have found the answer.

Immigrants must make their lives outside the frontiers, languages and systems of exchange that previously sustained them. Practices develop on the basis of this loss. As a result of this distance, they form certain perceptions of all they come to miss: tradition runs into an imaginary remembered world. The places that have been lost become fictional areas of mourning and contemplation of the past.