Cultural Humility

“Oh no. Please don’t make me do another diversity training.”

This is how we were introduced to cultural humility. It was the one brown person on the board of a local organization that was reckoning with a problem: in a state where people of color are the majority, the board and the organization’s members were overwhelmingly white. So, diversity training. The despair—the exhaustion, really—from the one dissenting board member was palpable. “How about we do something with ‘cultural humility’ instead,” she suggested.

To be honest, it sounded like the same thing.

But the term was compelling too. Maybe because of its implied opposite: arrogant often seems an apt descriptor for people who refuse to recognize the importance of the cultural factors of other persons’ lived realities.

At the same time, the term cultural humility is itself problematic. Shouldn’t we all have pride in our cultures? Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the US especially are fighting many lifetimes’ worth of messages that their culture is less than, undeserving, something that holds you back. Cultural humility?! Thanks, but we’ll pass.

Queer, deaf, non-Christian, and any other people who don’t see themselves in the white upper-middle-class vision of America may feel the same way. And yet, when the three of us read Tervalon and Murray-García’s 1998 article introducing the concept, it resonated: rather than seek competence in interacting with people of other cultures, be open to cultural dynamics in any interaction. Let the other person determine how relevant their culture is to the interaction and be cognizant of the power imbalances. Be aware of and work to correct the structural inequities in your organization or profession, some of which come from inaccurate cultural assumptions. Understand the power imbalances present in interactions and practice critical self-reflection. This, we thought, could work in libraries.

So, this isn’t the same old diversity workshop idea with a slightly updated wardrobe? To be honest, sometimes cultural humility is used that way. We’ve found plenty of “cultural humility” materials that could have come straight from those dreaded diversity trainings. But there are also many people using the term to mean something different, something unique and, we think, useful.

Our goal is to provide people with an understanding of cultural humility, why it is useful as an approach in libraries of all types, its relationship to other approaches, and how to develop a practice of cultural humility. We find cultural humility to be fundamentally hopeful. Transforming our libraries into more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations requires sustained and intentional effort, but meaningful change is not out of reach.

We hope you find it as compelling as we do.

Adapted from the preface Cultural Humility, ALA Editions.