I read a recent piece in Nature about environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor. Early in her academic career, she asked a professor why there weren't more Black students in her program. His answer: Black people aren't interested in the environment.
She spent the next three decades proving him wrong.
That story sat with me because I've watched the same assumption play out closer to the ground.
An older resident once asked me about starting a neighborhood recycling effort. Not because it was trendy. Not because someone told them to. They cared about where they lived. But that part of town had been overlooked for years. No bins. No outreach. No invitation.
The issue wasn't lack of interest. It was lack of invitation.
I see this pattern in public health, in digital access, in the way we talk about "hard-to-reach" communities. Population health taught me to ask who is being affected and why. When the answer to "why aren't they engaged?" keeps getting framed as their disinterest rather than our design, we're measuring the wrong thing. Whole neighborhoods, whole populations, get written off as disengaged when the real story is that nobody opened the door.
There's a concept in Southern African philosophy called Ubuntu: the idea that our humanity is tied to one another's. When we reduce any group to a stereotype, we lose something collectively. Not just them. All of us.
So I keep coming back to this question: What if communities labeled "not interested" are simply tired of knocking on doors that were never meant to open?
And what would change if we stopped assuming silence means apathy and started asking what people actually need?