Celebrating Melbourne's diversity
We were asked to come up with a plan on how we can celebrate Melbourne's diversity and I think the only way we can achieve real diversity is to stop teaching prejudices against women, people of colour and the LGBT community to children. We have to stop assuming that everyone's default settings are straight and cisgender. We have to stop making films and advertisements where everyone's assumed straight until proved otherwise. I think if we focus on teaching children to ignore their parent's prejudices then they will grow up to be more understanding and accepting of difference. People aren't born racist, sexist and homophobic, they learn to become those things from their parents. Making characters in children's movies gay or ANYTHING that's not heteronormative will make so many people feel represented, it can make them feel like they are finally getting a say in what type of characters we have in the media. Making every character cis, white and straight is so unrealistic because real life isn't like that and once everyone knows this then we can celebrate true diversity.