When White People Don't Know They're Being White

Aimed primarily at Christians, this essay is a good rumination on cultural competency, vs cultural humility.


<snip>
“Culturally competency” is a popular term these days, and while I appreciate the sentiment of the phrase, I’ve been feeling terribly inept culturally. When it comes to race relations, failure is simply inevitable. I recently mistook an Iranian student for an Egyptian and suspected immediately that I’d offended him. I hadn’t meant to – I’d really just confused him with another student – but I couldn’t take my words back either, and didn’t know enough about Middle Eastern culture to know how offensive my assumption truly was. After stumbling a little trying to retract my words, I fell back not on competence, but humility, “I’m sorry,” I admitted. “I didn’t know. Please forgive my mistake.”

A colleague recently introduced me to the term “Cultural humility” and I instantly connected to it, for even with all my practice being married cross-culturally, earning a degree in multicultural education, speaking several languages, traveling on 4 continents, and spending my days with immigrants from around the world, I often feel culturally incompetent. I only speak two languages fluently, not six like some of my students. I grew up in a monocultural cornfield and have had to work to learn anything I know about the rest of the world, which is still not really enough. I have always lived in my country of birth, and don’t have near the depth of experience or insight about cultural adjustment that the world’s resilient immigrants know.

Culturally, I am far from competent.

But cultural humility? This makes sense to me.

</snip>


http://thelinkbetween.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/when-white-people-dont-know-theyre-being-white/