I'm Dr. Robert Ortega. I'm an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work here at the University of Michigan. Today, I want to talk to you about social work and caring in the context of cultural humility. This is an important subject because as we think about culture and the diverse populations, we have to realize that American society has really reached a pluralistic and diverse tipping point. We really have to appreciate the fact that cultural complexity is revealed in any of the multiple social identities and cultural expressions, and the linguistic diversity that characterizes our society. Culture matters for a number of reasons. In particular, culture shapes our beliefs, our attitudes, our perspectives, and maintains our comfort with the familiar. That is when we go into strange environments and one of the first things we do is we try to find something that's familiar, people who are like us and all. It kind of organizes around what we think about is our internal working models. Culture is more than a category; it is the intersection of multiple experiences that shape our social identities. We think about it as intersectionality influenced by context and changes over time and in a sense, explains our uniqueness in the fact that we are not all alike. Culture shapes our coping skills, our patterns of resilience. Culture's related to how we think, how we feel, and our behaviors. Culture matters in the helping process, or in the caring process for a couple of important reasons. One is, it explains many of our service inequalities as it relates to our inability to address the diverse needs in our health, mental health, education, juvenile justice, criminal justice, and other fields of service, which we think about in connecting with who we are in terms of our race, our ethnicity, our gender, our ability, and so on. If we ask the people themselves, we see a great amount of dissatisfaction with human services expressed by members of marginalized and under represented groups, suggesting that some of the services and some of the things that we provide are not really reaching them or not considered relevant. There's a number of enduring challenges in the focus on culture and caring, and we have seen this throughout the time that we've, in our work, tried to focus on culture and the importance of culture. One is the fact that the evidence base really tries to draw on what we think about as universal truths or things that are generalizable. In a sense, when we think about the importance of knowledge, we have to be careful about the knowledge about cultural differences, because then we have the dubious problem of fostering stereotypes. Addressing culture and all also requires us to think about diversity in the context of individualism and so we have to respect individuals of course, but we also have to think about how culture in some ways defines the social contexts in which many of us resonate. We also have to be careful about blind spots, that is, the things that we can see. Sometimes there are things outside of what we can see that exist that, because of our cultural orientation, it's hard for us to see. Epistemic privilege is a good example of that. Epistemic privilege refers to the lens through which we view the world, and sometimes when we view the world through our lens, it sometimes doesn't coincide with the lenses of others. So it requires us to think about our cultural uniqueness and the extent to which others have cultural uniqueness as well. We also think about caring. Caring is about providing relevant services, so caring as service means the work that we do has to be adaptive, it has to be effective, and resonate with the people with whom we work. But caring is more than just a service, it's about relationships, and so an additional challenge is not just that we do our job, but that we do our job so that it's relevant and it includes the voices of the people with whom we work. There's also this aspect of cultural loneliness, and that is, many of us experience because of our cultural uniqueness experiences that in some ways marginalize us, or in some ways under-privilege or oppress us so that our voice becomes lost in a sense. In the work of Jill Stauffer in a book called Ethical Loneliness, she talks about this story that's not being told, which is different than the story not being heard. The story not being told means it's one that we need to allow ourselves to be accessible to, to hear. But if we're not able to hear it, it's one that doesn't get told. In caring relationships, what do we do? Why do social workers care? We talk about the four pillars or the pillars upon which we all thrive, safety, trust, support, and hope. Each one of these is an important part of the caring that we have in the relationships that we develop with others. We have to think about this idea of the voice of silence, I referred to it earlier as the unheard story. This is a really interesting quote, "The experience of being abandoned by humanity and then not being heard occurs when stories of resilience take precedence over tales of inhumanity." This is the one quote in Jill Stauffer's book that really affects me at least. Because it suggests that sometimes in the work that we do, we want to hear the stories of resilience, of recovery and all. But we have to remember that people bring with them hardships, stories, experiences that in some ways don't necessarily feel good. Sometimes what happens is, as we see in the next quote, "Our responsibility is to change our narrative or internal working model, to recognize vulnerability and revision a way to sensitize ourselves to hardship that our own coping and privileged experience allow us to avoid." In basic, what that means is, when we think about the stories of others, when we hear things that we don't necessarily like to hear, we have a choice. We go with it, we move forward in it, and we continue to in some ways enter the people's lives with whom we work or we retreat, we go back to our privilege and we think about their stories as something that we're not able to relate to or connect with. This brings up an important concept that I think is really important in social work and that is this idea of cultural humility. Cultural humility challenges us to broaden our cultural perspectives and frames of reference, to see what we do not see. I think about the faces of cultural humility, which is something that I've introduced to the work that we do in cultural humility. The faces are; one, the focus in ourselves and an awareness of ourselves, and from a cultural perspective. Then, I think we need to think about others independent of us, and the concepts of differentiation, for example, or separateness and all, suggests that other people live lives that we may not be familiar with. I think one of the challenges is to recognize that others have a life separate from ours. Then finally, there's this idea of transcendence. Transcendence means over and above. So that we think about the fact that you experience things, I experience things, our clients experience things, but we don't experience all that is to be experienced, that's still out there. So it is a big picture, I mean if you want to think about humility and cultural humility, it's this idea that things go on around us everyday that we may never experience. It's an important part of the recognition of us to think about the limits of what we know, even the limitations of what others know. I think that in a sense, inspires us to think about this idea of cultural humility. We think about the difference between cultural competence and cultural humility. Competence calls on expert knowledge about unfamiliarity with cultural differences. So when we think about the chapters in the books that we read, Chapter 11 focuses on working with Latinos, and Chapter 12 focuses on working with African Americans and all. While those may be informative, they have their consequence of fostering stereotypes or in some ways, trying to boundary cultures. So that in some ways, people read those things and compare the people with whom we work from these cultural groups in the context of what they've read. Cultural humility says, just set it aside for a moment and think about learning from the people with whom we interact, reserve judgment and actively bridge the cultural divide between our perspectives. The skills of demonstrating cultural humility include active listening, reflecting, reserving judgment, and entering their world. Each one of these has its own, what looks like basic social work but collectively, they have certain requirements for us when we think about what cultural humility looks like. When we think about the implications for social work practice from a cultural humility perspective, we're called on as educators, researchers, and practitioners to remain culturally humble, curious, and committed to embracing the complexity of who we all are so that our caring is relevant. It must connect with our clients cultural loneliness, draw on their cultural identities and strengths, and demonstrate caring as both service and relational, respecting the realities of the people we serve. Then here's some references that I think are important for us to think about. I'm certainly there's more, but these are some ideas about the importance of cultural humility.
