When it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), there’s good news and bad news. The good news is it hasn’t gone away and probably won’t. Despite MAGA’s best efforts, most Americans realize that diversity is simply another name for reality. We understand that inclusion is good and right, and equity is key to the health of individuals and groups. We get that both are core teachings of most spiritual traditions for good reasons.
And there’s bad news. Unfortunately, as organizations reel and reorient from the radical right’s assault on DEI, many are making the same old-school mistakes that contributed to the backlash. One is the resurgence of a focus on “cultural humility”.
Cultural humility is a paradigm developed in the late 1990s by two female African American physicians. They designed it to equip physicians to be humbler and more effective when communicating with their patients of color and other marginalized identities. At the time, cultural humility was an improvement on the concept of “cultural competence”, which also emerged from healthcare.
Cultural competence itself represented an important shift in the 1980s. It emphasized the existence and importance of cultural differences between different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups — just as the United States began its rapid shift from majority-white to multilingual and multiracial. Cultural competence focused on developing physicians’ awareness, knowledge, and skills in communicating respectfully and effectively across these growing differences.
Despite these positives, “cultural competence” had limitations. Its emphasis on “competence” implied a fixed end point at which someone could achieve that competence, when in reality individuals behave situationally and cultures are constantly changing. It treated different groups as monoliths whose defining feature was their race or culture, while reality is far more complex and intersectional. Cultural competence training tended to emphasize facts, tips, dos and don’ts, which often led to learners gaining a false sense of “competence”. Such training also failed to develop skills like maintaining presence, listening actively, expressing curiosity, and responding flexibly that are far more effective in navigating the dynamic nature of cultural differences.
Dr. Melanie Tervalon and Dr. Jann Murray-Garcia in conversation about cultural humility.
Cultural humility made a valuable contribution by addressing these limitations. Instead of treating cultures as monoliths, it revealed cultures as fluid and personal. Instead of offering prescriptive “dos and don’ts”, it taught people to develop curiosity and relativism. Instead of implying a fixed state of competence, it emphasized ongoing self-reflection. And, unlike cultural competence, cultural humility subtly introduced the critical topic of power differences.
These were vital improvements to our thinking about interacting across cultural differences. But just like its predecessor, “cultural humility” is now outdated, and its limitations outweigh its earlier benefits.
