This diary was originally a series of comments in response to a diary by HonorFredHampton, and others who engaged in a discussion of the putative benefits of dialogue with Trump voters among family and friends.
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I’ll start by saying I disagree, and if you want to discuss why, I’m happy to.
For now, let it suffice that I don’t believe the approach you recommend [engaging in dialogue with family and friends who voted for Trump] will work, not in the short term, not in dealing with the reality of what a Trump presidency will do to the country, or to the individual lives that will be destroyed because of what his campaign has brought into the open. Nor will it help in the long term, to win any elections by persuading someone who would vote for Trump to consider the progressive view of social justice or economic issues.
I don’t have immediate family that voted for Trump, but several of my in-laws did. Let me point out that my in-laws are people who have known me for over thirty years. So, undoubtedly like the members of your immediate family, they have known my views over this time. I have spoken with them about whatever issue or news story they care to bring up. Never once has there been yelling, or storming off, or refusing to attend each other’s family occasions. They know that my wife and I have raised our children to celebrate cultural diversity, and (I am grateful to say) this has been reflected in who my children have developed friendships with, and the groups and organizations they chose to join in high school and college.
With this as context, the relationship with my wife, my children and me, has not once deterred members of my extended family from voicing explicitly racist, sexist or homophobic views, or making ‘jokes’. Your own description of conversations with your father seem similar to my experience.
You are welcome, of course, to emphasize this:
those people who are truly family, friends and neighbors will remain that regardless of the next 4 years. True human – and American! - relationships demand that we look beyond the current situation and see beyond it and look to remain united as Humans and Americans.
Having said that, how many of these family members and close friends ever changed, in any substantial way, the views they hold? They care about you, and I don’t doubt they respect you.
And yet, the message your father has taken in is not to use the word ‘nigger’ in front of you or your children, because it upsets you:
I’m just too fucking old to change, but I love you and him too much to let that bullshit come between us
If you weren’t his son, would he extend the same courtesy? You and he (father and son) can continue to be family, but what has changed?
[Note his father saying he is ‘too fucking old’, and so has no intention of changing.]
So, people can decide not to break off from their family, decide not to speak about issues that make everyone upset. Go along to get along.
But then what?
You get to say you get along with family and friends who already accept you, care about you, and they are not seriously confronted with the heinousness of their views.
If it were your child, or sibling, or spouse, that was harassed, faced overt discrimination, or was the victim of a hate crime, would you still be so inclined to ‘find a way to get along’ and ‘not go through life pissed off’?
The F.B.I. reported Monday that attacks against American Muslims surged last year, driving an overall increase in hate crime against all groups…
In its report on Monday, the F.B.I. cataloged a total of 5,818 hate crimes in 2015 — a rise of about 6 percent over the previous year — including assaults, bombings, threats, and property destruction against minorities, women, gays and others.
Attacks against Muslim Americans saw the biggest surge. There were 257 reports of assaults, attacks on mosques and other hate crimes against Muslims last year, a jump of about 67 percent over 2014. It was the highest total since 2001, when more than 480 attacks occurred in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Attacks against transgender people also sharply increased.
Blacks were the most frequent victims of hate crimes based on race, while Jews were the most frequent victims based on religion, according to the F.B.I. data.
These events don’t occur in a vacuum, and rationalizing them as belonging solely to ‘the fringe’ — that is, somehow not contributed to by those who don’t commit hate crimes, but who hold the attitudes aligned with bigotry— excuses every person who contributes to them, whether by their active endorsement of, or passive acquiescence to, the attitudes and beliefs that say racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and homophobia are just ‘different viewpoints’, or even ‘the traditional way of looking at the world’.
If I don’t renounce the ideas, I won’t oppose the actions.
And we need the actions to be opposed, by enough people, if we are to eliminate the harassment, discrimination and hate crimes. These things continue because too many people tolerate them from a safe distance.
How has getting along with bigots, saying we’ll still treat them as family and friends, no matter what they say or how they act, ever worked in your experience to get one person to renounce their bigoted ideas?
If I read your diary correctly, as of 2016, with the election of an outright fascist sexual predator, who counts klan members and Nazis as close advisers— and this was known by anyone who spent ten minutes paying attention to the campaign— not one person renounced their views, even among family and close friends.
There are far too many people in this country who have suffered and died, just in the past year, and many more who will in the next four or eight years, to wait to see if this approach, which shows no sign of working, will somehow work in the future.
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DKos member CatteNappe stated:
A seed was planted. Diarist may never know if it germinated or grew, but that conversation may have led his father to think twice before using that word in the presence of another child (or grown up). And the ripple effect of that abstention may never be known by either of them. But at least the seed was planted.
I replied:
The father stopped saying ‘nigger’ in front of the son.
In other settings?
There’s a difference between not saying something in front of a family member, who the racist knows doesn’t agree, and not saying it in any other setting.
A seed was planted?
This is clearly what many people wish to believe, but what in the past year has suggested to you— with individuals, and looking at the country as a whole— that these planted seeds bore any fruit of positive change?
How many seeds have progressives planted over the past hundred and fifty years, with how many family members, friends, neighbors? A lot of seeds, over a long time.
Bigotry sat quietly in many households, in many communities, after decades of ‘not upsetting the liberal relations and neighbors’. This past year has taught us getting people not to say offensive things around liberals diminished bigotry not one bit.
Why is bigotry so prevalent, and so virulent, if gently planting seeds has the effect of ‘rippling outwards’ and gradually creating change?
This is an appealing image— our quiet persistence, gentle reminders, from a place of caring, will bring about the change we want.
There is an alternate way of looking at the history of the country, and this perspective tells us that this approach— gentle reminders from a place of caring-- has never produced substantial change.
Here is an article from 1967. You might notice how disturbingly familiar these observations sound, fifty years later:
Patterns of Persuasion in the Civil Rights Struggle, Herbert Simons, Temple Univerity
Today’s Speech Vol.15, I, 1967
For those of us who were disheartened by the apparent white bigotry and Negro hopelessness reflected in the 1963 poll, the 1966 survey was not too encouraging. Among Negroes, 15 per cent say they would join a riot. For every one who believes that the Negro cause has been weakened by Watts-like rioting, two believe that it has been helped. Among whites, 64 per cent insist that Negroes "are asking for more than they are ready for," 43 per cent assert that the Negro wants to "live off the handout" and 70 per cent think that the Negro is "trying to move too fast." These figures for whites, all up from 1963, also suggest an increasing polarization of attitudes between the two races. (pg. 25)
What of the attitudes of whites, then and now? Here again from 1967 polling:
What brand of oratorical wizardry can make a weak housing discrimination bill palatable to white senators or reverse the view held by three out of five low-income whites polled by Harris that Negroes "smell different?" (pg. 25)
Compare this with Reutors/Ipsos polling from 2016:
Nearly half of Trump's supporters described African Americans as more "violent" than whites. The same proportion described African Americans as more "criminal" than whites, while 40 percent described them as more "lazy" than whites.
And that’s undoubtedly including some whites who are savvy enough, or embarrassed enough, not to make such overtly racist views public.
Here’s Pew polling from 2016:
About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while only 21% of Democrats agree. For their part, a 49% plurality of white Democrats say too little attention is paid to race these days, compared with only 11% of Republicans.
And while about eight-in-ten (78%) white Democrats say the country needs to continue making changes to achieve racial equality between whites and blacks, just 36% of white Republicans agree; 54% of white Republicans believe the country has already made the changes necessary for blacks to have equal rights with whites.
‘Too much attention paid to race’?
That sounds quite a bit like the DKos members who suggest we ‘move past identity politics’— which is to say those who call themselves progressives, but who tell us we must abandon ‘identity politics’ to win elections— find themselves comfortably within the ranks of conservative Republicans. Perhaps those so antagonistic to ‘identity politics’ might want to ask themselves how they find themselves among such ideological company.
We can understand why people want to smooth things over with bigoted relations— it’s upsetting, especially with family members and friends, when we realize that they think, and say, horrible things, and may act in horrible ways— like refuse service to someone who is African-American, or Muslim, or LGBT.
Tell me how attitudes have changed in the last fifty years, that planting seeds with bigots has brought about any change in the attitudes, or the numbers, of bigoted whites in this country.
Are we the first generation of progressives to confront this? None before us thought about gentle persuasion, planting seeds, making one person do one thing different, as many here and elsewhere would have us do?
Again, from 1967:
Peaceful persuasion is the method rhetoricians understand and characteristically prescribe. Textbooks tell us that persuasion must take place on the listener's terms, that the speaker must adapt to his auditor's needs, wants and values. It is axiomatic, we are told, that effective communication requires a shared frame of reference and a common set of symbols in an atmosphere free from fear and threat. By all of our scholarly yardsticks, the effectiveness of the civil rights advocate ought to be a direct function of his psychological proximity to white audiences…
However successful the method of peaceful persuasion ought to be, however much it may seem theoretically that the method is the only effective alternative, the very endurance of other rhetorics is evidence that this is not so. (pg. 26, emphasis in original)
Sticking with the approach we prefer, simply because we want it to be the right approach, doesn’t mean it is the right approach. Isn’t fifty years enough? A hundred?
How long before we realize family and friends can tolerate our views, not become belligerent, and not change one little bit?