Kelly Knox
Dec 12, 2021
Good Morning. It is so wonderful to be here, to see everyone. I have missed this community so very much.
The idea for what has now morphed into nothing more than a conversation starter, was born of me telling Reverend Janet that I was chairing the diversity equity and inclusion committee where I work and that I was taking courses to become certified in diversity equity and inclusion. This piqued her curiosity and she asked if I’d write something about what I was learning. I chose cultural humility because I just love the term – without even knowing what the textbook definition was, I fell in love with the concept.
Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia came up with the concept in the late 90s to augment cultural competency training for physicians to better address the inequities in the healthcare field. They came up with three principles
- A personal lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique
- Recognition of power dynamics and imbalances, a desire to fix those power imbalances and to develop partnerships with people and groups who advocate for others
- Institutional accountability – these institutions needed to be held accountable for upholding these principles.
As the term grew traction and people started putting it into practice, the academic feeling of the “official” definition softened. And, it began to filter into other fields including education, public health and social work. Shamaila Khan, a clinical psychologist at Boston Medical Center, writes that “cultural humility involves understanding the complexity of identities — that even in sameness there is difference — and that we can never be fully competent about the evolving and dynamic nature of a another person’s experiences.”
As I was preparing to write this I thought well, why not social justice work. I had grand plans to create something new, cogent and exciting to share. But here is my inconvenient truth, I have no idea what cultural humility looks like in practice – let alone injecting my ideas of it into a new field of work. I don’t know what diversity equity and inclusion work looks like in practice. It’s all new to me. I have been an activist of one sort or another since my early 20s, and I had never had a conversation about race with a person of color. My whole “activist” world blew up this past week as I was desperately trying to pull this together.
So the best I can do here is offer you things to ponder. Share with you some of the things I came across while traversing the internet. Just a heads up – I am going to drop stories without neatly wrapping them up. They are there simply to make you go hmmmm.
So let me start with my friend John at work. On Monday morning last week I went into John’s office and said, “John, would you be willing to have a conversation about race and cultural humility with me?” And, being the gracious man that he is, he said yes. So, Monday afternoon I had my very first conversation about race with a person of color. It was one of the most difficult, awkward and rewarding conversations I’ve ever had.
Tervalon and Murray Garcia share a story in their original paper on Cultural Humility of an African American nurse who was caring for a post-operative Latinx woman. A male Latinx physician came in to the room to provide a consult. He noticed the patient was moaning rather loudly and told the nurse that it seemed her patient was in a lot of post-operative pain and didn’t she think the patient needed pain meds. The nurse responded that she had taken a cultural competency course in nursing school and learned that Latinx women exaggerated their pain and more medication wasn’t necessary. The Latinx Dr., although he tried, had a difficult time dislodging this faulty learning.
My initial reaction to this story was anger. It was a big WTF! First off, who was teaching that cultural competency course!? The thing is though, anger and humility don’t live well together.
I love me some Brene Brown. How about y’all?
Brene has a podcast titled Unlocking Us and recently had a two part conversation with Karen Walrond where they talk about her new book The Lightmaker’s Manifesto, How to Work for Change without Losing Your Joy.
The two of them speak to anger and activism in the second part. At one point Brene says, “I wonder how long we can fuel activism on rage vs what you are talking about in the book. Rage activates me. That fuel burns really hard and really hot and really fast. And the fumes of it are poisonous. It can propel me pretty far. It almost poisons me as it is fueling me.” Karen responds “I say in the book that I am very pro anger. Anger and rage can be very motivating. The trick is it might be the spark, but I don’t think it should be the fuel.” Karen goes on to say that “the fuel is the learning, the self-compassion, the staying in your values, the kindness, the measuredness, the purposefulness.”
Unlocking Us Brene Brown and Karen Walrond
Now you might be wondering – what does that conversation have to do with cultural humility Kelly? Here is my logic – if humility was a living being, its life force would be learning, self-compassion, values, kindness, measuredness, purposefulness and for the purposes of tying in the reading on curiosity and empathy – let’s include them as well.
Speaking of curiosity:
I was at a family gathering recently where a checkers tournament was happening in the background of the festivities. At one point my 18 year old cisgender nephew and my 57 year old lesbian sister were competitively playing while having an intense conversation. I think when you play board games it provides space to have conversations you might not otherwise have. They were discussing transgenderism and pan sexuality. Although each were discussing this from different vantage points – age and sexuality – they were both on the same page. They didn’t understand either. However, their exploration of these issues was respectful, non-judgmental, and fundamentally based on curiosity. This seemed to me to be the essence of cultural humility.
Humility, it could be said is understanding that we don’t know what we don’t know. But, sometimes we forget that we don’t know what we don’t know. A great example of this is a story Ijeoma Oiuo tells in her book So you want to Talk about Race. Ijeoma is a black woman with a white mother. This one day her mom calls her and leaves a message that she has had an epiphany about race to call her back. Despite talking about race for a living, Ijeoma had never had a conversation about race with her mother. The short version of the story is her mother called her to say she was telling a joke at work with a punchline f”or black people,” not “about black people” and one of her black co-workers piped up and asked what do you know about black people? At that point Ijeoma’s mom tells her all the emotions she went through reaching the conclusion that this black guy at work just doesn’t know who the good white people are. Ijeoma cringed at the thought of the forthcoming conversation with her own mother. The discussion broke down the difference between being a white mother who has loved and lived with black people and being an actual black person who experiences the full force of white supremist society first hand. Her mom came to accept that she does not know the black experience and never will. She has “shifted her focus on race from proving to black people that she is ‘down’ to pressuring fellow white people to do better.”
Amazon link to the book So You Want to Talk About Race
This story comes down to the personal for me. I work with a white woman who raised two African American daughters. She is on the DEI committee with me. When we were talking about me being the chair – which happened before I read Ijeoma’s book, I pondered why she wasn’t asked, surely she had more knowledge about DEI than I did. She agreed and seemed a bit miffed they asked me over her more, mutually agreed, qualified self.
Here is another thought: a whole lot of good work can be done without humility being a driving force or a foundational value. Consider Cassius Clay – Mr. Mohammad Ali himself. He was one bravado sound bite after another, but his philanthropy and humanitarianism was just as legendary. It reminds me of this Buddhist story I read in the Tricycle magazine. There was this great Buddhist teacher who was at the end of his life. He was at home in bed this one day when his students came to say their goodbyes. They surrounded his bed and reveled all over him – what a great teacher he was, so insightful, a great story teller, kind, they went on and on. At one point his wife noticed he was getting anxious and tired so she asked the students to leave. When everyone was gone she asked him what was wrong, they were all saying such nice things about you, it must make you feel good. He said “yes, they were all saying wonderful things, but did you notice not one of the students mentioned my humility?” I wonder if Cassius Clay had any thoughts on humility when he was saying his goodbyes.
I think once you start talking about humility, it becomes much more difficult to maintain humility. I really like the excerpt Reverend Janet read from Everett L. Worthington, Jr.’s book Humility (link to book on Amazon) because it captures the elusive nature of humility. During my deep internet dive I read something that noted that there were very few sermons about humility for just this reason. The other great point Worthington makes is humility cannot be experienced alone – “there is no dividing line between the arrogant and the humble, between the proud and the modest; none can achieve humility alone.”
Is humility the thread that ties humanity together? Are the people who touch down into humility as Worthington expresses it the people who can, who will save humanity?
Here are my thoughts on cultural humility and social justice work at this point in time, which is greatly influenced by Brene and Karen’s conversation on Unlocking Us. Humility offers us the space between righteous anger triggered by injustice and the work that needs to be done. It provides the strength of tenderness that allows ourselves and others to feel valued. Cultural humility starts with understanding humility and for me, right now, as a result of this work this week, humility is simply getting out of my own way, engaging in community, listening to others – really listening and believing, believing what people tell you no matter your capacity to connect it to your own emotional understanding.
The piece that Pat read, the beautiful triad: curiosity, humility and empathy (link to blog post) really ties this together as well as it can be tied at the moment. I wholeheartedly believe curiosity, humility and empathy braid perfectly together – along with the words Karen Walrond shared in Brene’s podcast.
This is my hope and prayer for each of us that we have the courage of humility to let go of our narrative and say – I don’t know; the courage and compassion of curiosity to say I want to know and the courage of empathy to say I know how you feel.
