When I was a kid, holidays meant playing in my grandparents’ basement with my brother and cousins. We turned Grandma’s hats and polyester pants into costumes, pounded the cracked keys of an ancient piano, and marveled at Grandpa’s forgiveness after we jammed a Wiffle ball down a hole of his pool table.
But one day as we all played, my youngest cousin disappeared upstairs. A few minutes later, her mom called us into the kitchen. My aunt looked angry. She reprimanded us for being mean to our cousin and told us to be kinder.
As I puzzled over why my aunt was upset, I chalked it up to the fact that my cousin was younger than the rest of us. Years later, my cousin told me what she remembered of that day. When she went upstairs, she had tearfully asked her mom, “Why do I look different than the rest of the family?” My little cousin was trying to understand why she was the only Black child among a group of white cousins. But that wasn’t something our family talked about.
Years later, I learned my grandfather had so vehemently opposed my aunt’s marriage to a Black man that he had refused to attend the wedding or to allow my uncle into his home.
Many families try to tiptoe around sensitive topics—or ignore them altogether. In doing so, we avoid naming or solving the source of conflict and pain. And our silence communicates volumes.
As you gather for holidays this year—if you gather at all—your family might be skirting around conversations about politics, race, religion, depression, addiction, and myriad other touchy subjects. In these polarized and insular times, the number of risky topics seems to be ballooning. We’ve heard too many stories of family gatherings that end in shouting and tears, with relatives refusing to gather for the next holiday.
A poll conducted last Thanksgiving found that a third of Americans were uncomfortable at family gatherings due to political differences, and half of Americans had at least one estranged relative.
We are living in what author and journalist Jonathan Rauch calls an epistemic crisis—a breakdown in how our society decides what’s true and how to make collective decisions. We have lost the skills for understanding one another, but more than that, many of us have lost the will to try.
As holiday gatherings become a battleground of this larger epistemic crisis, many of us choose avoidance. While there may be times when letting a subject rest can be a step toward healing, we cannot build loving relationships without honesty.
But here’s some good news: Talking about sensitive topics is a learnable skill. According to sociologist Derisa Grant, many of the conversations people avoid are not inherently difficult. We make topics difficult by deeming them ineffable. As an anthropology professor, I traffic in difficult conversations. I teach people how to understand each other across differences, and that means talking about the whole gamut of tough topics—race, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration, politics, and more.
related
When I started teaching anthropology at Wheaton College ten years ago, my most challenging students were those who disengaged because they believed they already understood other people. Lately there’s a different challenge: Students disengage because they no longer believe it’s possible to understand others.
Several years ago, I began a research study to learn how individuals develop long-term commitments to the well-being of groups they consider different from their own. Specifically, I explored what it takes for white Christians to develop enduring practices that address racism against people of color.
I interviewed 30 nonwhite Christians about their experiences with race and asked them to suggest white individuals whom they saw as advocates for racial justice. I then interviewed 40 of those white Christians to study their practices. In my forthcoming book, Racial Justice for the Long Haul, I share what I learned about how to talk about difficult topics like race. I’ve come to believe that these kinds of conversations could help mend broken relationships and ultimately our society.
Conducting these interviews taught me that some conversations are like the table saw in my garage. Cutting wood without the proper training can cause serious injury. But add in some woodworking courses and safety gear, and it’s a different story. I’m ready when something around the house breaks, and I can make beautiful and functional pieces out of scraps of wood. Likewise, if we take the time to prepare ourselves, God can turn even the most challenging conversations into something beautiful.
What does that preparation entail? Here are three practices that I’ve seen work.
First, stop denying the bad. Christianity is not built on denialist optimism. We do not have a shallow hope that says, “Honesty is the best medicine” or “Time heals all wounds.” We hope in Christ, who met the bad face to face. We know that Christ is our peace, having broken down dividing walls of hostility (Eph. 2:14). We bring our dreaded subjects to Christ because “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
As I grew up in the 1980s, my family’s silence about race followed the trend among white communities at the time. We embraced colorblindness, pretending we could remain blissfully unaware of how the surrounding culture trains us in racism. We kept that silence even as racism ripped through our family.
When I left for college, my default method for dealing with racism was to avoid mentioning race. But race kept showing up at my door. I worked as a residence hall assistant, and one night I heard a tentative knock at my door. A first-year student who was Black asked me with tears streaming down her face why her white roommate acted as if she didn’t exist.
A few weeks later, in another room shared by a Black student and a white student, the white student’s parents placed a masking tape line down the center of the room. They shouted at the Black roommate loudly enough for the hallway to hear, “Don’t you dare cross over onto our daughter’s side.”
I had no idea where to begin, but I knew I couldn’t deny that something very wrong was pulling us apart.
That’s where the second practice for difficult conversations comes in: Ask questions. Learn the context behind people’s decisions. Rather than assuming they should make the same choices you make, ask about the circumstances or history that led to their choices. As I once heard another researcher say, “When you start to think, ‘Those people are so stupid,’ it’s time to do some more research.”
Doing that research can take many forms. One woman I met started questioning racial inequalities when she talked to her coworkers at a fruit farm. Later she worked with children in an under-resourced neighborhood, and she wondered about some of their habits. “They were eating Cheetos all day,” she noticed. Instead of jumping to blame their parents, she began to ask questions. Were their parents unable to afford vegetables? Did their long hours of work prevent them from cooking? Why did they seem stressed and sleep deprived? She called this season of life “asking a lot of why.”
Asking why can prepare us for difficult conversations, but God doesn’t promise that information alone will solve our disunity. We also need a third practice: radical grace.
Throughout my 70 interviews, grace and the related words forgiveness and mercy came up in more than half the conversations. Nearly all the white people I spoke with told stories about receiving blessings they didn’t deserve.
Grace happens when people recognize that a debt exists and when the person who is owed gives something freely to the debtor—not to coerce a response but to move toward a new way of relating to one another. This grace runs counter to strategies of avoidance or revenge.
Too often we settle for cheap imitations of grace by either ignoring the bad or demanding forgiveness. Grace isn’t meant to let people off the hook. It’s meant to lead us into honesty and love.
My research focused on the debts formed through racism—legacies of who was allowed to enter the US, who was denied, and who was forced to live here. I looked at our unevenly funded schools and our segregated neighborhoods and churches. These debts are not abstract and distant—they cut through our friendships, our families, and our congregations.
Preparing to engage with difficult relationships through radical grace involves actively pursuing wisdom by learning about each other. It means leaving defensiveness outside when we step across the threshold of a relative’s door for a holiday gathering. And it means extending love when our instincts pull us toward hate.
We must practice this radical grace within the body of Christ. When cancel culture reigns, we can make a countercultural choice. As one person I interviewed put it, “At the end of the day, I’m not going to throw you off the island, because that’s not an option.” As members of Christ’s universal church, we are part of a covenantal community. We belong to one another.
“The commitment to still love one another is not just a fuzzy feeling,” this church leader continued. “We have to figure it out. We have to stick to the hot mess … [and] it’s a sign of the kingdom when it is hot and messy. I’m not saying that toxic, abusive behavior should happen. But if we’re really engaging with each other, how could it be anything but a hot mess? Too often that’s when people leave. But that’s the moment right before when you might actually experience transformation.”
For me, “sticking with it” means allowing the lessons I learn as a Christian anthropologist to seep into my family conversations.
As I was forming my research into a book, I met up with my cousin at a botanical garden halfway between our homes. We talked about childhood memories, sharing stories we had never told each other about how race—and grace—shaped us.These days, our children are the ones playing together in the basement at holiday gatherings. We owe it to them to place honesty, courage, and radical grace at the center of our family.
Related
