Broadening Perspectives & Seeing Ourselves

Lucretia Berry, July 13, 2021

In April, our family joined Global Glory Chasers (GGC),  a subscription experience featuring a different country and culture each month. Designed by multicultural family and travel enthusiasts, the Gilmore-Youngs, GGC offers curated educational resources and culinary experiences for families and classrooms. 

Peering through the windows of books, music, food, and cultural practices helps us not only understand our interconnectedness with our global neighbors, but also helps us develop a positive and belonging framework for how we see and experience the world. Through learning about our neighbors, we also grow to know ourselves.

GGC has been great for our family! So far, we’ve engaged in learning together about the Philippines, Italy, and now Haiti. Each month, together as a family, we watch a teaching video produced by the Gilmore-Young family. Then we enjoy cooking two of the three featured dishes. We also learn dances, read books, and use the conversation prompts to talk about the featured country and culture. Our children love learning from the Gilmore-Young children. Our nine year old said,

“I like seeing them prepare and cook the food!  I like how they teach us about different places.”

During last month’s focus on Italy, creator and mom, Dorina Gilmore-Young, interviewed her mother, Maria Lazo, to engage in a deeper conversation about Italian culture. They talked about her family’s migration to the U.S., her journey discovering her cultural identity, what it was like raising multiracial kids, and how food and hospitality are important values in her culture. Watch the interview here.

The interview was intriguing and inspired us to interview our Italian grandparents. As a multi-ethnic family living in a hyper-racialized society where cultural and social identities are reduced to a few racial categories (e.g. Black, white, Asian), we are intentional about embracing as many of our ancestral ethnic identities and stories as possible. Society easily frames our children in a bi-racial narrative, just as it has framed my husband and me in mono-racial narratives. However, our ancestry holds complex and valuable stories that continue to color our lives. We want our children to understand the complexities of social identities – racial categories, ethnicities, cultures, cultural heritage, nationality, and more. 

Through yearly family reunions, on-going ancestry research, and story-telling, our children get to know my ancestry. To access some of their father’s stories of ancestry beyond being white, we wrote out a few questions for our girls to interview their Italian great-grandmother and her son, who is their paternal grandfather. 

1. Where in Italy did our family come from?
2. When and why did our family migrate to the US?
3. What kind of work did they do when they arrived?
4. What are your favorite things about Italian culture?
5. Have you been to Italy?  

Watch the thirteen minute interview. We learned so much and can’t wait to learn more.

We appreciate how Global Glory Chasers has inspired us to chase and see God’s glory revealed in our collective and diverse stories. We encourage you to join in this fun-loving, eye-opening, family and classroom friendly learning experience!