Oooooh, that’s a difficult one.
Some people fixate all their energy on changing their relatives,which is draining, frustrating and doesn’t work because contrary to popular belief people rarely change their mind in a debate. People change their mind when the foundations of their opinions are being questioned by their personal experiences. You’re not likely to change your relatives through conversations, although that doesn’t mean you can’t plant some seeds for when the time comes.
Some people avoid talking about politics entirely. This is possible and can work, but it also means your relatives miss a part of who you are, especially if activism becomes an increasingly big part of your life. You could arrive at a point where your way of looking at the world becomes so different that you feel out of touch with them entirely, like you don’t speak the same language anymore. And if you’ve never talked with your family about why you protest, you may not receive any support from them if you find yourself arrested or doing prison time.
Predictably, most people try to find a balance between occasional intense conversations about their political believes, the activism they do and why they do it, and long periods of just being family and caring for each other as families should do. Which isn’t always easy. Healthy communication boundaries can help, like having a clear way to assert when a conversation becomes to exhausting and making sure everyone can end a political conversation at any time.
Finally, there are painfully liberal ideas and then there is bigoted and harmful behavior, which is a whole different thing. If you are maintaining a relationship with someone whose behavior is bad, you need to seriously check with yourself:
- Are they treating you right? That’s priority number one. Someone who harms you has no place in your life. Someone who consistently questions your identity, makes you the target of their bigotry, belittles you, etc has no place in your life.
- Are they treating your other friends right? Can your activist friends, your friends with minority identities, etc, be at a party without being targeted by harmful behavior and microaggressions? You really have a duty to protect your friends from that shit. If it means not inviting a bigoted sister to your wedding, then that’s what you gotta do.
- Do they cross a boundary beyond which you can not in good conscious be connected to them? This is a very personal one. I couldn’t have a family or friendship connection to a cop, or a deportation-cop, or a prison guard, or a nazi, or a member of a white supremacist group, etc. These things are so far outside what I consider acceptable that I wouldn’t want to give them even the slightest feeling of human connection. I refuse to collaborate in their happiness.
That’s about all I can think of. Oh, and: try to make sure you have some people in your life who do share your politics and support your activism, who will pick you up outside the police station and not give you shit about getting arrested, who will not question your motivation for breaking the law, etc. Having emotional support from comrades like that in your life is very important. To find it, you might need to go to some events without your painfully liberal friend.
