Cultural Humility

Cultural humility is an approach to working with people across differences that centers ongoing self-reflection rather than claiming mastery of another group's culture. The term was introduced by physicians Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998 to address health inequities. They described three parts: a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique, a desire to correct power imbalances, and building respectful partnerships with communities. In LGBTQ+ health, social work, and advocacy, cultural humility means recognizing your own biases, listening closely, and treating each person as the authority on their own life instead of assuming competence from general knowledge. It is now used in medicine, public health, education, and nonprofit work.