It's Extremely Past Time For Us to Call Out Our Racist Family Members

Let's talk about this for a minute.

I’m speaking to the white people here. Everybody else, y’all feel free to take a breather and go enjoy soothing content that will take your mind off of news horrors, like maybe Little Miss Furious or Dwight Lightnin’ or Clementine Carpendog or Kristin Sitova or Pirsig and Edwin or Animals Doing Things.

Or if you’d prefer soothing content that’s art-related and not animal-related, try Jeannie Dickson, Minortis May, Artventure, or Annette Labedzki.

Fellow white people:

I am sure that you’re all as appalled as I am by the news out of Atlanta last night. We who’ve been watching with eyes open the past four years know that the rise in Asian hate crime is not a coincidence. It is a direct result of the former president’s insistence on using racist terms like “China virus,” and his obedient-sheep supporters following his lead.

I have a family member (my Uncle Charlie) who uses the term “China virus,” and he did so as recently as one month ago in an appalling email to my mother, which she read to me over the phone.

I long ago severed contact with this man and no longer consider him a relation of mine. I’ve tried to disengage completely. But it has infuriated me that he has carried on parroting the racist tropes of the former dictator of our country, especially under the guise of expressing condolences to my mother about my father’s passing.

His comment to my mom was that it is the fault of “China virus” that we couldn’t hold a memorial for my father yet.

This made me angry for a whole lot of reasons, but I let it go since the email didn’t come to me, and my meditation teachers tell me that it’s important to release anything I can’t control.

Can I control the circumstances that made my uncle walk around this planet as this smug, self-satisfied person who is so steeped in white supremacy that he can no longer understand what is appropriate or decent? I can’t. I’d have to have headed that off at the pass back in the 1940s or 50s, and I wasn’t around.

But let’s get beyond magical thinking. Here’s the real point. What is my uncle’s hideous brand of racism teaching me? How is his behavior, and my revulsion at noticing it, a reflection of something inside myself?

I’ve avoided looking too hard at this because I don’t want to give credence to racist tropes, even to denounce them. It’s much easier to relinquish and detach, since I can’t control it. It’s safer emotional ground to ignore racism and really, just really fervently hope it goes away soon.

But that is the point. How will it go away if we, white people, do not make it go?

My racist uncle’s role in my life, at this point, is to teach me to stand up for what matters. To teach me who I want to be.

As we learned last summer after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many other Americans whose lives mattered, when we ignore these problems, they get worse and worse and worse and worse, and it is, as it always has been, Black and brown and indigenous people who pay for our ignorance, for our very white, very comfortable ignorance.

White folks’ collective wake-up call should’ve happened long before last summer, but it didn’t. But now that it has happened, we cannot afford to go to sleep again.

Set some alarms if you have to, you know?

White people have been ignoring and avoiding our complicity in the white supremacy that our country was founded on for 400 years.

And I know. It’s so much more comfortable to avoid engaging. I love to hit snooze like every other red-blooded human on this planet. Hard conversations are hard, after all. We don’t want to do them. We would rather sidestep, enjoy the sun, enjoy the day. Roll our eyes at our embarrassing uncles and pledge never to become them.

Because they’re just too old to get it, right? Too old to bother with. Too old to learn any new ways. Smirk at their clueless rants and carry on with your life. You’ll never change their minds, so why bother. Getting angry about someone else’s opinion is a waste of time.

Yes, and.

The older I get, the more not-okay I am with the idea that someone downstream of me in time has to die because right here and now, I’m afraid to open my mouth and have a hard conversation where I let someone know they’re accountable to me for their racism.

Black people have been telling us these stories and doing this work to help us dismantle white supremacy for years, generations, and it is the shame of our entire race that we’ve never listened in a way that made us each, individually, accountable for this.

If we’re not outraged, we’re not paying attention.

I understand in a new way, now, that we each have an individual responsibility to end white supremacy, and that the way we do that is by — donating and listening, yes — but we also have to take this fight to where it is scariest, which is inside our individual family units, and inside our own fearful hearts when we would really rather not go there.

(I should probably also, someday, learn how to charge my phone battery.)

My Virginia family members will likely be horrified at my rudeness to my uncle, an elder. That is not done in my family.

I’ve called him out before, so it’s not gonna entirely sideswipe them, but this is the most direct I’ve ever been. You might know the cliché that many Southerners, particularly old Southern families, are proponents of politeness and of keeping disagreements quiet. Simmer and rage, never express it, die unfulfilled — this seems to be the Platonic ideal of Southern familial relations.

My family of origin in particular hates an argument, or airing a grievance. They will run circles to avoid ever having a difference of opinion.

Our grandparents’ generation did all the fighting, and the screaming, and they also perpetuated all the drunken abuse that accompanied all the fighting and screaming.

Those who are here now, who survived all that generational trauma, are here for a good time, and that *only.* You’d have fun at the cookout, but you’d have no idea what they really thought about you. Or anything. I still don’t know, and I’ve known them for 43 years.

Any skeletons that may or may not reside in any closets are to be boarded up in there, bricked over, sheetrocked and plastered and sanded and overhung with a nice landscape painting of dogwoods. Birds. Perhaps a nice ocean view with loopy text declaring Life to be A Beach!

“Quiet as its kept” isn’t a cliché, it’s an epidemic.

But racism isn’t a disagreement like “which type of potatoes should we serve at Thanksgiving” or even “should we have prayer in schools.” It’s a fundamental difference in what it means to respect our fellow humans’ dignity and right to live.

It is not rude or impolite to call out racism. I’m uncomfortable with my complicity up until this point, and I pledge to never again be.

Here is a masterclass from Paul Scanlon on one way to do it, if you’re worried about doing it imperfectly. I worry about that. I worry about seeming reactive, when I’d rather be cool and get along.

What a laughable notion — being cool, getting along — when it is literally a matter of life and death.

There are not two equally valid sides to this, and I don’t need anyone to affirm this position for me, because I know in my heart that it’s true. And I’m starting to worry that if we don’t all get really — individually — brave and call it out, every time, we are going to face a much-worse incarnation in four years or eight or twelve, and by then they (Hawley? Cruz? Someone unthinkably worse?) will have learned more about how to pull off a successful autocratic coup. We so narrowly avoided disaster in November.

We don’t want to find out how this story ends.

(We know how it ends.)

Let the anger of last night galvanize you if you’ve never gotten in this fight. It’s past time for us white folks to call our racist family members (and friends? if we have those?) out. Every time. We tried taking the high road, and it did not work. We tried having conversations with them. It fell on deaf ears. Polite outreach just means they are free to politely ignore us.

Pass the sweet tea, hun.

We need to be direct about our expectations: how we will be treated, how others will be treated in our presence, what will and will not stand in our society. We can never say we didn’t have opportunities to stand up for what’s right, and to decide for ourselves how to combat white supremacy in our communities. We’ve been shown a hundred thousand opportunities. Have we risen to them?

I’ve risen imperfectly in the past. I’ve stood up to some things and let some other things go. Letting things go always causes me shame after the fact, and I’ve become less likely to let it go as I’ve gotten older. But today, I’m newly galvanized to show up for this fight every single time it comes for me in the future.

So if you need someone else’s permission to get impolite — to rage — consider it granted. 

Eight people woke up dead this morning. I don’t want a single iota of the time I have left on this earth to contribute, even passively, to the advance of white supremacy. These people are dead due to white supremacist, anti-Asian violence, although some reporting this morning has suggested it may have been just good old-fashioned anti-woman violence. But *which type* of hatred it is isn’t the point. Anti-black racism gained traction under the last administration, as did anti-Muslim racism.

Every possible way there is to hate non-white, non-straight, non-cis-male people gained traction.

Brianna Holt @BriannaNHolt

When every community continues to call on the SAME community to stop hate toward them, it’s even more evident that THAT particular community needs to do more work.

And every possible way to let white male violence off the hook for itself has been plumbed, too.

New York Magazine @NYMag

In a disturbing press conference, captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said that suspect Robert Aaron Long “was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope,” adding, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did”

nym.agGunman Who Killed 6 Asian Women Was ‘Having a Bad Day,’ Police SayThey’ve also denied that the attack was racially motivated.

I bet you, too, had a bad day yesterday (#CovidDay367) and yet somehow managed not to murder eight people.

The former president’s racist rhetoric targeting all the groups he has targeted is a root cause for this violence.

It’s not the only root cause, but it is a contributing factor for how all this hate-in-words (it’s never just words) finds its final, tormented outlet of expression in our country — up to and including the eight murders in Atlanta yesterday. Anti-Asian hate crime is on the rise, and it is not okay, none of it is okay, and it’s not going away unless we make it go. White people are accountable for this just as we are accountable for anti-black racism, and we have to find ways to do our part to stop all of it.

People of color can’t keep teaching us white people how to care and how to stand up. They’re tired. They deserve rest. We need to pick up the ball and carry it. We need to do that when and where it is hardest.

These Georgians’ lives all mattered. It’s not impolite to tell your family members the truth about that.

Also, ban guns and get some therapy. God.