After watching Barbara Lee’s community engaged learning talk about Asian representation, I found myself with ranges of emotions regarding certain topics she brought up. I find it heartbreaking and couldn’t imagine the internal hardship she faced when she mentioned that she didn’t see a lot of people like herself while growing up. In different ways than what Barbara Lee faced, I found myself in similar positions, where I was the only one out of my friends or people around me, at school, or in the sports I played, that had divorced parents, or had family trouble and never had my parents volunteer at school events, or throw big birthday parties. I always felt different and although this is on an extremely small scale compared to what Barbara faced, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to feel so isolated within her community just because she looked different compared to everyone else. I find it sad that she felt that her family had to do “all of the Canadian things” like learning how to skate and eating certain foods. To me, it really shows the environment that we as Canadians give to people coming to our country for the first time, and making this place their permanent home. I think that by Barbara’s family feeling like they had to do all of the Canadian things to fit in, it means that immigrants and minorities are being further suppressed, and removed from their culture. This in turn contributes to more underrepresentation which Barbara talked about, and the blatant act of whitewashing occurring, as we are forcing minorities to do more “white” things and act in more of a “westernized, white way”. I think that we as a society need to stop doing that, as cultural diversity is extremely important in my opinion, and it would be devastating for our westernized way of living to eradicate many other cultures across the world. We should be embracing the different cultures that exist, and not suppressing them.