"It's Your Responsibility to Challenge Bigoted Relatives Over the Holidays"
The dinner table is one of the most sacred places in the household. For many families, it is the place where difficult conversations, delicate family dynamics, and restorative fellowship all come together. These complex events come to a head here because the dinner table is a safe place. Often, during the holidays, the dinner table feels so safe that many family members are comfortable uttering their most racist, transphobic, queer antagonistic, misogynistic, and generally ugly ideas over their turkey and cranberry sauce. Some white people who see themselves as nonracist will just play nice instead of clapping back directly at these problematic family members. This year, consider doing something different.
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Neighborhood segregation means that many white Americans don’t see many nonwhite people as members of their communities, and certainly not as their next-door neighbors.
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Not only are white Americans often isolated by race where they live, they are unlikely to be surrounded by friends and loved ones who are nonwhite. If anti-racist white people do not muster up the courage to challenge their bigoted family members this holiday season, no one else will be there to do it.
These forms of isolation mean that many white Americans don’t have to confront racial differences in their personal and daily lives. Because of white privilege, many of them can simply opt out of difficult conversations that challenge internalized stereotypes or beliefs about people who aren’t like them. These attitudes are shaped from an early age. As University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis put it in a recent piece in the Boston Review, when citing a study of white school children in a specific town in the Midwest, “almost none develop a meaningful critique of structural racism, question their own privilege, or think seriously about how to combat racial prejudice.” They may “oppose overt racism,” he continued, “but they also see themselves as deserving of every advantage they have received.”
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What it mostly boils down to, though, is not being passive. Quietly forking away at your yams and green beans while Aunt Susan spews hateful messages about Black people, immigrants, or gender nonconforming people won’t do anything to change the status quo. It’s just another way of allowing these toxic ideas and beliefs to permeate throughout generations and social networks every day. How about stepping up to do something about it?
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/thanksgiving-holiday-family-politics
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