When my cousin Julia invited me up to Maryland to meet her boyfriend Brad, have Christmas dinner, and stay for a few days, I agreed, mostly because I hadn’t seen her in 10 years and I felt guilty. It was a good feeling to be welcomed back into my East Coast family’s life, because my relationship with my cousins had been, by and large, something that simply existed. We were cousins, not best friends. As for her boyfriend, we were friends on Facebook. I knew he was going to be abrasive and eccentric well in advance, but nonetheless I drove up one cold day, expecting it would be nice to catch up but also a bit awkward as all family get-togethers are, with a family member's boyfriend thrown into the mix. This turned out to be much, much worse than I thought. I soon found out that this new boyfriend wasn’t just a regular, disagreeable guy; he was a megalomaniacal white supremacist with political ambitions that would make your uncle Craig’s statement of “Nuke California” seem tame.
It sounds far-fetched. But here’s what I observed. He called himself a Viking demigod who wanted to create a kingdom of only white people in Maryland, and he wore a sword around the house. I would watch him walk around the house in his Viking costume, stopping in front of the mirror to admire his reflection, and muse aloud about how pure and perfect he was. He would let slip comments about genocide and the “survival of our race,” always followed with a laugh. He’d walk behind his father, recovering from a recent stroke, and ape the way he walked and moved. He’d mock my cousin for cooking his food wrong, and say that to not mock her would be “social Marxism.” With all this, his proclamation that those with disabilities were subhuman and shouldn’t be afforded the same dignity as able-bodied individuals, and just the general ludicrous nature of nearly every interaction we had, the picture was becoming clearer.
At first I thought he was trolling, when I figured out he wasn’t, and knew now that my cousin was with an actual racist, my first instinct was to argue. I tried to fight his views that rich, white, abled men like him were the most advanced race of people, and that anyone who was disabled, female, or had a year-round suntan was basically a child with voting rights. He had an answer for everything. He brought up arrest records of minorities to prove his points, brought up the lack of women in STEM, and brought up the fact that according to him, someone permanently disabled could not “contribute to society.” His parents looked on, aware of their son’s machinations, with a certain note of pity and combined with bewilderment that I was still sitting around with him.
I admit my experience was extreme, but it made me think about the divided nature of many people’s families, particularly during the holidays. Politics have always been fractious, and along with sex and religion have traditionally been warned against. With the recent political climate, the rise of social media, and the pell-mell race to the furthest ends of the political spectrum, this rings all the more true. Nonetheless it’s important to engage and have reasonable conversation, if only for the sake of trying desperately to bring them over to the other side. So I decided to make an attempt to find out how.
Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association, has outlined a specific formula for dealing with relatives when it comes to thorny political discussions. Wright’s formula is to identify to yourself what your goal is with the conversation, that is, to discern what the objective is with the conversation in question, whether it be to proselytize or simply to try to understand the other side. Second, personal attacks and judgement-passing should be avoided, to avoid either shifting the conversation away from the topic at hand, and perhaps more importantly to avoid escalating the already-tense environment. Finally, and most sobering, it should be accepted that some minds cannot be changed, and accepting this prevents frustration and discouragement from overtaking any future conversations. This is a growing, pertinent topic, with the American Scientific Association stating that over half of children “mispercieve or reject their parents’ political party affiliations.”
My conversation wasn’t with a family member, but the point remained. Here I was, faced with an actual dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist, quite possibly my ideological antithesis, and in retrospect, I realized that I’d gone through many of these steps with my cousin’s boyfriend myself. When I tried to fight his racism and lost, I next tried to use science and logic to argue with him. He maintained that evolution progressed in a linear fashion, twisting the common “out of Africa” theory of human origin and stating that after leaving Africa, humans progressed further along the evolutionary scale, with white people like himself at the latest generation of this progress. I confronted him with the scientific evidence that directly contradicted him. “Mainstream media brainwashing” was all he said, perhaps an Ur example of “fake news” as a refrain. He wanted to establish a sovereign nation by buying land, seceding from the US, and establishing an all-white “libertarian monarchy.” He planned to start this kingdom by taking over the recording industry to try to retake it from the grasps of music genres that were spearheaded by minorities. I told him it was untenable. He had no idea how studio equipment worked, or how much that would cost. I did. I told him. He didn’t care. Finally, and most egregiously out of left-field, was his assertion that he was a direct descendant of the Norse god Odin, making him a demigod, and on the next evolutionary step above the rest of humanity, making him the ideal monarch for this kingdom. It was at this point that I decided it was time to break contact. I had to drive out first thing in the morning. I never spoke to him again after this, and my cousin soon followed suit. The only reason she’d been dating him was to irritate her wealthy father, who had picked similarly wealthy-but-vapid boyfriends for her. To be honest, I don’t talk to her much anymore either. She should have cut him out her life sooner.
That’s the final lesson here. Like Wright said, there are some arguments that simply cannot be won. As a fourth step, it’s important to know when to stop trying and to move on. If you keep trying to fight with someone whose ideas are abhorrent to you, and they’re not willing to listen, then ultimately you’re only making yourself crazy. And for your own sake, it’s time to disengage.