The Thanksgiving “Trump Discussion”
On Being the Face of the Opposition around the Holiday Table
Like every other progressive I know facing a Trump presidency, I’ve been struggling to balance my anger and outrage with a compelling need to channel my feelings into something positive. In the midst of that process, here comes Thanksgiving, and time with the family.
As I’ve heard in conversation after conversation, many of us are either dreading the holiday with our Trump-supporting relatives or are simply avoiding them by skipping the holiday altogether this year. I understand both inclinations. But it seems we cannot avoid a Trump presidency, and perhaps we should not avoid the family Thanksgiving, either.
It could, after all, present a unique opportunity to do something many of us sadly failed to do earlier: put, for others, a familiar face on the progressive movement that opposes Trump.
I am not a person of color. I am a 51-year-old cis white female married to a cis white male for almost 25 years. I am not a member of the groups that will be the vanguard of the growing protest movement. But in unprecedented times, it is imperative that we all contribute what we can. And what I can contribute, here, are a few thoughts on a lifetime of talking to my family about things on which we disagree.
In that lifetime, I’ve tried numerous tactics. As a child, I staged mini hunger strikes and would glare, silent and hungry, refusing to speak in the presence of older family members who used racial slurs as liberally as they used table salt at family holiday meals. Perhaps it had some effect; my beloved paternal grandmother refrained, to the day she died, from using those terms in my presence, though I know they remained part of her daily vocabulary when I wasn’t around.
But in all I have found simple discussions to be more reliably effective. My strict Southern Baptist maternal grandfather never accepted my atheism, but he did accept me. In many ways, I was like him. Neither of us ever backed down from our beliefs, but we did not simply dismiss the other person as an extremist. We found a way to talk to each other.
So, to the task at hand. Here are my own experiences with “the Trump discussion” in my own family. Maybe they can be helpful to others.
The Unwinnable Battle
Not every member of my family is as approachable as my grandparents. I have cousins to whom I have not spoken in years because they are extremists. They are unapologetically racist, or homophobic, or Islamophobic, or all three. When we were children, we lived in the same town on the same one-lane, dead-end road. But when our schools were integrated in the early 1970s, my comparatively progressive mother (who never used a racial slur in her life — and had found herself living in unfamiliar territory when she married) insisted that my brother and I attend the school in our district, one that was to be integrated. My cousins’ parents instead opted to procure post office boxes in the county and form carpools to drive the kids to the all-white elementary school there. The result was that we cousins had very different childhoods, while living next door to one another. Is that why we are so fundamentally different? Is that why conversations I could have with other family members were verboten with them? Perhaps.
Whatever the reasons, with these family members I will not waste my efforts.
The battles would be unwinnable. Time and again I have seen that I cannot change the minds of my racist, homophobic, Islamophobic cousins. We have no common ground beyond distant family ties.
A Success!
There are, however, family members who do not fall into these closed-minded categories, people with whom I do share basic values and beliefs. It is with these people that a dialogue can be most productive.
My only sibling is my brother who is two years younger. We have always been close, but have little in common. What we do have, however, is respect for each other. When he and I have spoken about the election and his leanings toward Trump, I appealed to that respect. When he indicated his vote would be one of “protest,” I pushed him to describe what he thought would be gained and who would gain it. When he seemed uncertain about his response, I explained what I feared from a Trump presidency. I reminded him that while his day-to-day life may include few people who are LGBTQ, people of color, or Muslims, he does know “those people.” At the very least, he has met them through me. He has shared meals and holidays with them at my house. He has watched his children play with their children. He has never uttered a single derogatory comment about them in my presence.
I asked him to replace the Trump-supporting, racist, bigoted rhetoric aimed at whole swathes of the United States with, instead, the names and faces of the people he knows.
I asked him to remember how important some of “those people” are to me, and how important I am to him.
That appeal changed the conversation. I believe it is because it is much more difficult to hate someone we know, even someone we only met at a sister’s house for a barbecue. Now, even after the election, my brother and I have been able to maintain a dialogue about what our country is facing.
A Failure
In some cases, even with family members whom I believed to be “persuadable,” I have been wrong.
My large southern family is one in which generational lines become a bit blurred. My mother’s youngest brother is only two years my senior. We grew up together, more siblings than niece and uncle. As is true of almost every other member of my extended family, he is conservative. He has grown more religious as we have aged, but I have never known him to be racist, homophobic, or misogynistic. So, after the success I’d had with my brother, I tried a similar tactic.
It failed. The anger my uncle feels at a world he believes is changing for the worse is something I’d underestimated.
He feels threatened and nothing I said had effect; my arguments fell on deaf ears.
It was then that I realized a relationship with a person I have loved dearly since childhood, one that has included his presence at every significant moment of my life, was at risk. I had to retreat, but did not admit defeat. A world in which Trump is president is one that seems poised to take much from me, but it will not take that relationship, though it is now strained in ways I could not imagine before.
Besides, if I abandon the relationship, my uncle will likely have no other dissenting voice in his world.
Allies
As Mana Kharrazi pointed out in her recent article “How to Be an Ally Beyond a Safety Pin,” it is important to me that I
“focus on listening to requests for support.”
I plan to keep that in mind over the coming holidays. While I am certainly the most progressive member of my extended family, I am not alone. Indeed, there are a couple of younger cousins who are quite progressive and are making their voices heard. When I find myself in a gathering where they are included, I will be a visible and vocal ally, as I hope they will be for me. This is a practice so many of us have used repeatedly over the years, responding to requests from our allies in the fight for a world in which all are valued. But it isn’t something to be used only in public. It’s just as important in our kitchen arguments, in our families’ living rooms, around their dining tables, and over beers in the back yard. We need our allies. We need to be allies.
I also remind myself that there are potential allies out there as well, ones which I may only find when they respond to my actions. It is time for those actions to move beyond a safety pin.
