Recently, my daughter showed me a TikTok trend comparing supposedly “disgusting” cultures. Indian culture was coming out on top.
Soon, versions of those jokes began showing up at her school.
“Did you know during Holi they throw poop on each other?”
No. During Holi, people throw brightly colored powders that can mix into a muddy brown.
After one student vigorously knocked another on the head: “It’s like an Indian head massage.”
This is how misinformation works: something vaguely recognizable gets distorted, turned into a joke, repeated, and eventually becomes one more way of marking a group as strange, dirty, or laughable. I have spent years as an equity consultant helping schools and organizations respond to exactly this spectrum of ignorance, misinformation, bias, and hate.
But this time, I was on the other side. I wasn’t asking, What intervention will help this institution change? I was asking, What will keep my daughter safe?
Her principal was immediately ready to act, which I respected. I have watched leaders respond to harm by waiting, observing, investigating, and hoping something resolves itself. When someone is already experiencing harm, institutional patience can feel excruciating. She suggested involving my daughter in a restorative process so students could hear the impact of their comments.
My daughter’s response was immediate: “There’s no community here. Restorative justice will just put a target on my back.”
That stopped me. She was right. Restorative practice depends on some relational infrastructure. There has to be enough trust for honesty to be possible, enough emotional skill to hear vulnerability without mocking or deflecting, and enough accountability so that one person’s bad response cannot make the process unsafe for everyone else.
There is nothing to restore if there wasn’t a meaningful relationship there in the first place. That insight has stayed with me because organizations are often not so different.
We work quickly. We communicate around tasks. We vary enormously in our capacity for conflict, emotion, and vulnerability. And yet when something goes wrong, we often reach first for our most aspirational tools: dialogue, restorative circles, vulnerability, storytelling, calling people in.
As a cultural strategist, I am drawn to those practices. I want reflective, embodied spaces where people understand that feelings contain wisdom. But I am learning to ask another question first: What level of vulnerability can this system safely hold? Vulnerability is not automatically liberatory. Without enough skill and trust around it, vulnerability can be misunderstood, dismissed, mocked, or weaponized.
My daughter proposed something much simpler for her school. She did not want a lesson on empathy. She did not want to explain why the jokes were hurtful. She wanted a clear expectation:
- Don’t make jokes about cultures you are not part of.
- Teach the boundary. Enforce the boundary. Stop the harm.
At first, part of me experienced this as a backslide. Where was the deeper transformation? Then I realized: it is not a backslide if it stops the harm.
Safety is also a culture-change outcome.
A clear behavioral boundary may not transform someone’s worldview, but it can create the conditions for deeper work later. This experience has made me think differently about sequencing culture change.
There is the culture we long for, and there is the culture a group currently has the capacity to practice. Our job is to understand the distance between the two.
Sometimes the next step is a restorative conversation. Sometimes it is storytelling, reflection, and relationship building. And sometimes it is simply: You cannot behave this way here. While that is not the final destination, it may be the bridge.
Before asking the person who experienced harm to tell their story, we should ask:
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- Is there enough relationship here for vulnerability to be held with care?
- What happens if one person responds badly?
- Can the institution protect the person harmed from retaliation?
- Can we address the behavior without requiring the harmed person to educate everyone else?
Perhaps one measure of an equitable culture is not only whether we know how to center people who experience harm, but whether we can protect them without requiring their vulnerability as the price of protection.
The culture we want may be one where people can tell the truth, repair harm, remain in relationship, and grow together, but getting there may first require something less romantic and more concrete: Clear expectations. Real boundaries. Consistent accountability. Then the relationship. Then vulnerability. Then, perhaps, restoration.
Culture change is not only about knowing the destination, but also about accurately assessing where we are-and choosing the next intervention that makes greater freedom possible.
Sangita Kumar
Mother. Cultural Strategist. Facilitator.
