The Façade of Cultural Competence and the Need for Cultural Humility in a Time of Social Unrest

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by Brittany Stahnke, DSW, LCSW, MFT

One of the trends of our time is the striving for what we call “cultural competence.” Cultural competence trainings lead us to believe that there is such a thing as teaching the necessary knowledge and ability to work effectively with varying cultures. As this idea becomes more of a focus and more widespread, the meaning of cultural competence has become blurry in many ways, skewed from our reality. By definition, once someone is competent, he or she has reached a destination. While the National Association of Social Workers’ Code of Ethics, Standard 1.05, remains titled “Cultural Competence,” changes that were made in 2021 include the necessary demonstration of competence, such as through education and awareness, and the need for cultural humility. Competence alone, or the belief that competence exists in a person, can simply steer us in a further ineffective, and possibly harmful, direction. We can never truly have cultural competence (NASW, 2021).

In reality, cultural humility—what the goal should actually be—is a process, always moving, always changing. It is more a skill we can always be developing, rather than one we ever attain. Cultural humility is neither an ability nor one set of knowledge. In many cases, clinicians who work from a false place of competence do harm: “the counselor failed to see her client as a unique individual, but rather saw her only as a Latino or a Hispanic client. She felt confident that her training in cultural competency had provided her with all she needed to know to make an assessment about her client’s well-being” (Jones-Smith, 2019). To teach something so unteachable, these classes can turn out workers who are confident in a competence they can never have. The assumption of competence places expectation and guesswork as to what it means to be that person in that group while the reality is that sharing a culture or demographic does not indicate sameness.

The NASW Code of Ethics dictates action. So what do we do? Some march. Some of us counsel harder than ever. Some, like me, teach and conduct research. Some fight to have laws changed. Some write to inspire, to help, to inform. But all of us should be contributing. As social workers, we have to push further, care more, and all at the same time, accept our powerlessness. Accept that we aren’t competent. Accept that we cannot ever understand, no matter how many marches we walk. Through no fault of our own, those of us who are white benefit from racial inequality (McCoy, 2020), just as those who are heterosexual benefit from homophobia. The rich benefit from poverty and the tax breaks of the upper class, being able to hold more of the distribution of wealth for themselves.

As I am driving down the road, I witness a Black man lying in the middle of a street lined with cars, begging someone to hit him with his or her car. This is what the needs of our times look like. Hopelessness, suicidality, poverty, and for many, a lack of meaning in life. We are witness to a pandemic unequally taking the lives of marginalized populations. As a result of this pandemic, we are witness to the economic recession hitting the lower classes at a harder rate. We are witness to discriminatory police practices—and the racist lack of responses from all levels of government—that end Black lives.

Cultural Humility in Action

Practice

First, as practitioners, we can practice and strive for cultural humility. It requires that we have awareness of these issues as well as our own cultural biases. It addresses the natural hierarchy between therapist and client by assuming that the therapist is not the expert, that clients are in fact their own experts as to their own version of culture and where they fit in (Fisher-Bone et al., 2014). When you come from a place of unknowing, you empower the other person to be the teacher. You create opportunity to learn from that person—not about all the people of their culture, but about what culture means to them (and what it doesn’t), removing the cultural history of a group from the assumed experience of one individual (Rosen et al., 2017).

Cultural humility in practice is the way we interact with and address the culture of each client. It is the commitment to always be learning, not just about other cultural groups and experiences, but learning about each client we serve and their version of culture. Cultural humility is our commitment to intellectually understanding a culture or cultural trauma while never being able to actually relate to it. It also means we do not put people in boxes. When we put people in boxes, this assumes they have something vital in common. Maybe they do, but maybe they do not. Perhaps we need to stop knowing everything and start unknowing instead. Your loss does not mean the same thing as mine, my color means something different to me than it does you, and so does every other label I have. Some I claim, some I fight for, and some labels I just flat out reject. Yes, I can do that. We all can.

For me, I would be placed in these boxes based on my demographic check marks: homosexual, Caucasian, non-Hispanic, spiritual, 30-35, doctorate-level education, professor, middle class. None of these groups would be part of how I identify. My identity has so much more to do with who I am as a person—a social worker, a writer, a deep thinker, a traveler, an introvert—than it could ever do with who I love, or being white. I never struggled to accept that I could love a woman, but I resisted and hated the idea of divorce. And this is where my Catholic heritage shines through. Yet, I am most avidly pro-choice, as are my Catholic parents.

Anything other than cultural humility is arrogance and covert discrimination on the part of all people, but especially on the part of social justice workers.

Policy

We benefit from inequality by possessing certain privileges. The only way to change this is to take away the benefits of inequality through policies that protect all of our basic human rights.

When a doctor or nurse makes an error, somebody may die. When a social worker makes an error in practice, someone may die by suicide. When a police officer makes an error, someone may be killed. People are being killed. If under the premise of our jobs and the oaths we take, we do harm, it not only is an affront to ourselves—it is an affront to the profession.

First, policy can gatekeep. We can protect entrance into these crucial professions that hold boundless amounts of power. Doctors. Judges. Police officers. Teachers. Social workers. Nurses. Military personnel. Government. Requirements may include: four years or more of college, volunteering with marginalized groups, cultural training, a higher intelligence, a stable personality, therapy, and good health. Not every person has the genuine respect for others that these professions command and deserve. Most of these jobs currently require specialized training to perform them, but not all. Gatekeeping would minimize tragedy.

Second, we can teach cultural humility, which will help breed respect for the human rights of all people. The right to life. The right to humane treatment. The right to fair hearings. The right to change nationality. The right to opinion. The right to have these rights, regardless of who you are (UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, n.d.). If cultural humility was instilled as a product of a required education, and this was practiced and then tested across the nation, it would save lives. We should all be saving lives, not taking them.

Third, accountability must be demanded. There are certain jobs, such as these, that demand a higher level of accountability. All of these jobs are taken with the understanding and agreement to that level of accountability. Mistakes happen, but when tragedy happens and lives are lost, the difference between a mistake and a severe breach of justice must be determined. Constituents of these powerful professions must understand that injustice will have repercussions, rather than the pardons that have become standard.

Conclusion

We will never be culturally competent. But while we forever forge toward this ideal of competence, we can choose cultural humility. Let’s practice cultural humility by being aware—aware that we know nothing, but we can always do something. We are more so in a place where we can know how to advocate for human rights. Today. And that is where we start.

“The greater truth is that we would sometimes do better by throwing our theories out the window and meeting each person not just as a representative of his or her cultural group but as a completely unique individual with an assortment of cultural identities that include far more than ethnicity, race, and religion.” (Kottler, 2017)

References

Fisher-Borne, M., Cain, J. M., & Martin, S. L. (2015). From mastery to accountability: Cultural humility as an alternative to cultural competence. Social Work Education, 34(2), 165-181. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2014.977244

Kottler, J. A. (2017). On being a therapist. Oxford University Press.

McCoy, H. (2020). Black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: The parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Child Adolescent Social Work Journal, 37, 463-475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-020-00690-4

Ethical Standard of the Month: 1.05 Cultural Awareness and Social Diversity. National Association of Social Workers. (2021, June 1). https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Ethics-Education-and-Resources/Ethical-Standard-of-the-Month/Cultural-Awareness-and-Social-Diversity.

Rosen, D., McCall, J., & Goodkind, S. (2017). Teaching critical self-reflection through the lens of cultural humility: An assignment in a social work diversity course. Social Work Education, 37(3), 289-298. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/02615479.2017.1287260

Smith, E. (2012). Theories of counseling and psychotherapy. Sage.

Jones-Smith, E. (2019). Culturally Diverse Counseling: Theory and Practice. Sage.

Brittany Stahnke, DSW, LCSW, MFT, is an assistant professor at Newman University whose research interests include end-of-life issues and marriage.