American Cultures Merit Badge

The sentence above requirement 1

The badge begins with this, and it carries no number:

Choose THREE groups that have different racial, cultural, national, or ethnic backgrounds, one of which comes from your own background. Use these groups to meet requirements 1, 2, and 3.

Three things are happening in one sentence.

1. A choice is being made, and it is made once, before anything else.
2. A constraint is placed on it. The three must differ from one another, and one must be your own.
3. It is applied to three separate requirements, named by number. There is no box to tick for it and no letter beside it, so it is the easiest thing on the page to read past. Everything in requirements 1, 2 and 3 depends on it.

Choose with requirement 1 in front of you

Here is why the choice is not free. Requirement 1 asks you to do two of these, using a different group for each.

Four of the five need a community you can actually reach. Only 1(d) does not.

So the practical order is backwards from the printed one: look at what is near you first, then choose your three groups. A group with a cultural centre, an annual festival or a museum collection in your town opens four doors. A group with no local presence at all opens one.

Your own background is the group you can always reach

The note requires one of your three to come from your own background, and that is more useful than it looks.

Requirement 1 wants two options using different groups. Your own group can carry one of them: your family, your own place of worship, a relative who remembers the songs. That leaves exactly one other group that has to be reachable.

Pick that second one carefully, and let the third be whichever you most want to learn about, since requirements 2 and 3 are discussion and need no access at all.

Two threes, and they are not the same three

The categories differ too, and it is worth reading both lists slowly:

Cultural and national appear only in the note. Religious appears only in requirement 4. You may of course use people from your three groups for requirement 4, and it can be a tidy way to do it, but nothing requires you to and the badge is asking a wider question there.

Requirement 2 is the only one you cannot research

Everything else on this badge is going, seeing, asking or telling. Requirement 2 is imagination, and it has two halves that are easy to collapse into one:

1. Imagine one of your groups had always lived alone somewhere no other group ever came. What would that place be like today?
2. Now imagine all three of your groups had lived there at the same time. What then? The second half is the point of the requirement, and the first half is what makes it answerable. Do them in order and separately.

Requirement 5 is two skills, and only one gets rehearsed

Give a talk to your Scout unit or class at school on how people from different groups have gotten along together. Lead a discussion on what can be done to help various groups understand one another better.

The talk is preparation you control. The discussion is not. Leading one means having a question ready that somebody can actually answer, being willing to wait through the silence after you ask it, and doing something sensible with whatever comes back.

Prepare three or four questions rather than one, and expect to use the second one.

A word on visiting and asking

Requirement 1's options 1(b) and 1(c) involve other people's places and other people's time. Neither is complicated, and both go better with a little care:

• Ask before you go. A place of worship or a cultural institution will usually be glad to have a visitor who wrote or rang first, and may tell you when there is something worth seeing.
• Ask what is expected. Dress, where to sit, whether photographs are welcome, and whether there is a part of the building or the service to stay out of. Asking that question is itself good manners.
• Go through somebody who knows them for 1(c) where you can. An introduction from a teacher, a leader or a family friend turns a cold approach into a conversation.

The American Cultures merit badge, drawn so the choice above requirement 1 is made deliberately rather than by accident. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.