We will do almost anything to feel safe

“The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t.”

“White privilege doesn’t mean your life hasn’t been hard.
It just means the color of your skin isn’t one of the things that makes it harder.”

Most of our conditioned beliefs come from the dominant culture — tv, movies, cartoons, advertising, as well as school, family and our workplace. Some of our conditioning comes from experience — either personally, what people have told us, or what we have witnessed. To free ourselves from our unconscious deeply held beliefs, we need to be able to see them and be interested in educating ourselves.

Dorothy Riddle is a feminist psychologist who developed a scale in 1974 to measure homophobia. The Riddle Scale shows the nuance of the continuum of response from repulsion and pity, to tolerance and acceptance. Many people would stop at acceptance but she moves on to identify support, admiration, appreciation and nurturance, or a heartfelt welcoming of diversity. We all lose when we are blinded by stereotypes or limiting ideas about who people are.

There are power dynamics at play, like who benefits and who pays economically, emotionally, and socially through generations. Systems of oppression didn’t begin with me, I don’t agree with them, and yet as a…