Is Cultural Humility Too Easy?

Abstract

According to Google Scholar, there have been about 100 publications in the past 12 months about cultural humility and librarianship. Clearly, it is resonating with our profession as a way to make positive change towards equity, inclusion and justice in libraries and librarianship. We ourselves are firm believers that cultural humility can help those who practice it to decenter themselves and their own perspectives in order to better see, and redress, structural inequities and other forms of discrimination both within our libraries and through our services. Having spent the better part of a decade thinking, writing, and presenting on cultural humility, we have heard from many people who are excited about the concept. But we occasionally hear people praising cultural humility while almost simultaneously reinforcing and reproducing the very sort of structural inequities that a practice of cultural humility should aim to redress.