Exploring How Identity and Culture Influence Our Community

In this poem, the speaker explores how our culture would be lacking—in people, in music, in movements, in contributions—without contributions of African Americans.

In this poem, the speaker--who is Native American--responds to a series of unspoken discriminatory questions. The reader can deduce the missing questions based on the speaker's responses.

In this excerpt, the reader meets two characters from The Misfits: Addie, a girl who is exceptionally tall and smart for a middle schooler and Joe, who is creative and feminine in a way that makes his peers nervous.

Maleeka gets made fun of at school about her clothes, her grades, even the color of her skin. In this chapter, one of her teachers, with white blotches on her face, shows how she's been able to accept the skin she's in.

In this video, young people reflect on society's rules for what males and females can and cannot do.

This excerpt explains that families are defined by love, caring and sharing, not the number or gender of its members.

Rosie Molinary describes how she felt as a Latina teenager in the United States, caught between disparate and unrealistic beauty standards.

Meet Kennedy, of Mombasa, Kenya. His wheelchair doesn’t stop him from making the world a more beautiful place.

As a young Muslim girl, Zahrah wore her hijab to school on what is considered to be the most important day of the week in Islam—Friday. Not everyone at Zahrah's school understands her religious traditions, but a visit from her mom changes this.

“Every brain is a little bit different...”

“I wasn't like other kids.”

“Is there anything you wanted to know about me?”

“You said that you were in the wrong body, that you should be a man.”

“I always lived in fear that someone would discover that I couldn't keep up.”

Felipe Morales' telling account of an encounter with a blind woman on the streets of Washington, D.C. was recorded for This I Believe. The NPR project features brief personal essays in which people from diverse backgrounds discuss how their values affect their daily lives.

In this essay, Nhi relates her experience of moving to the United States from Vietnam when she was in high school. Her story illustrates the value of perseverance and “putting yourself out there.”