Thread by @JoLuehmann

One of the saddest and most harmful things that is taken from privileged identities due to their experiences is curiosity.

Privileged identities have been conditioned to believe their experience is universal, their behavior is “normal,” and their opinion is truth.

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They have been conditioned to protect their privilege by being convinced those who don’t have what they have are too lazy, too dense, too broken, too depraved, too ignorant; to get privilege like them. They think we all need what they have, they are the pinnacle of existence.

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This causes them to meet others with answers, as gods, with superiority, knowing it all. Which means they don’t ever consider they could learn something from those they meet who aren’t like them. Read the colonizers’ journals, they believed native people saw them as gods.

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Native people met the colonizers with curiosity, they thought those who weren’t like them were interesting. They brought them gifts, offered hospitality. They saw them as humans. They didn’t see themselves as superior, just as different. They knew different didn’t mean bad.

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They didn’t assume colonizers wanted to dress like them, eat like them, live like them. Colonizers were convinced native people needed saving from themselves and had to adopt the colonizers’ ways to be well. This costed millions of lives and destroyed beautiful cultures.

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And for those identities where we hold privilege, we all have the potential to be colonizers without curiosity, dehumanizing those around us because they aren’t like us. We also have the choice to be conscious we’ve been conditioned to believe this, and intentionally listen...
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to those in the margins. To those that aren’t like us, to those whose experiences have been different. Because the moment we meet them with answers, thinking we know what they need even though we haven’t experienced what they have; we’ve already dehumanized them in our brain.

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If you hold a privileged identity you get to reclaim your curiosity, not only will you stop causing a lot of harm but you will be made better by meeting those who aren’t like you with the assumption that they have something to teach you, that you have something to learn.

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Believing everyone is created in the image of divinity, doesn’t mean we are expected to be uniform; all the same, looking like the image of god you created in your head. Instead it means every person we meet has divinity within them and something for us to learn from them.