Biographical Humility

Biographical humility speaks to a person’s journey story – how a person is where he is. One of the issues at hand here is the poison that assumption is to restoration. Because how a person sees another determines how a person responds to another, it matters what a person assumes about another. In fact, great attempts should be made to avoid assuming anything onto a person’s story and how she arrived in the reality where she is presently living.

For example, it is very common to have a person drive up in an expensive vehicle (i.e. – Lexus, Cadillac, Suburban) to a food pantry that provides free food to people in need. The immediate assumption easily made is, "There is irresponsible behavior here. Get less expensive transportation and buy food for your family.” However, biographical humility would pursue the story of the client being served. How did he end up in this place of need? Has it been a journey of bad decisions or was it a recent job loss that has him in a decision-making process about where to go from here and how to get there? That food pantry’s service could be a very new and humbling experience for a client on a hard road.

Maybe it is generational poverty and that car represents a lot of unhealthy life choices. But when those unhealthy choices have been part of a person’s entire life history, it is what is known. Sociologists say that once a family has reached the third generation of poverty it typically becomes impossible for that family to immerge to self-sustainability because they know no other life road.

One year I was serving a local middle school by providing one hour of weekly character training for a class of students with ongoing behavioral issues. One day the character trait to be discussed was self-control. It just so happens there was a fight at lunch that day and two of the boys from this class were involved. When asked in the class discussion later that day, “Why would you not choose to walk away from a potential fight when you know what the negative consequences will be?” One of the students unhesitatingly answered, “Cause my mamma tells me, ‘You were born in the hood, you ain’t never gettin’ out of the hood, so you might as well learn how to survive in the hood.’” If that is a youth’s life story told to him by his mother because it has been her story, how is he to think any differently? For that student, the negative consequences were survival based – his story told him so.

Copyright, Chuck Coward, 2010