Family unfriended
When relatives drew her biracial daughters into a Facebook war, this mom told her girls to cut ties
I noticed the shift in “atmosphere” on Facebook sometime during former president Barack Obama’s last term in office. Our family is interracial — my family is Black (and liberal) and my husband’s family is white (and conservative). Their posts on my timeline started to resemble the stream of fake news and hate speech I’d seen elsewhere on social media. The two sides would often convene on an article I shared, trolling one another with language and evidence that was false or hateful.
I was not surprised when my older daughters, now adults, were drawn into the arguments. Many parents of biracial kids (like me, a Black woman married to a white man, raising six kids) know all too well how the families try to draw the children into the role of saviour, tiebreaker or “proof” of a point in the debates. For example, grandpa gets called a racist for his posting of a (clearly racist) meme. He responds by tagging his biracial grandchildren in a comment that asks them to weigh in. Or gramps declares that he is not racist and these Black grandchildren of his are proof. The children’s testimony is sometimes not required, but tagging them brings them into already contentious arguments full of fallacies, inaccuracies and coded hate speech. As parents, we have to shut this down and quickly.
My oldest girls, now ages 22, 20 and 18, were new to social media when the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election were starting to get really ugly. Facebook, a place where the girls once chatted with friends and exchanged silly videos, became a battleground for adult family members. The war was fought with memes, GIFs and misinformation splattered across my kids’ timelines. Our families started tagging my biracial children into these conversations to prove that they were not being extreme or racist in their views. Even if they didn’t participate, my kids were being used for social credibility.
Where one meme illustrated the Obamas as primates, another showed Southern white voters as toothless, dirty and trying to decipher the words on a ballot. A fake news report was shared by several of my husband’s family members that talked about gay agendas and Pizzagate. On my family’s timelines, there were warnings of white people amassing an army to cleanse America of Black people. Long conversations erupted whenever anyone tried to inform the poster that the information quoted was wrong. Saying nothing was the only safe thing, or so I thought.
One day, amid that chaos online, I overheard all three girls talking about how they avoid the platform because of all the hate speech and false information. It had become a daily battle to wade through all of it just to see what your cousins were up to or to catch up with friends.
Our families are scattered across the country. My husband’s aunts and cousins live in California, Texas and Minnesota. My family’s in Georgia, Texas and Michigan. There are uncles and cousins in Florida and in other nooks and crannies across the country. Everyone’s so far apart that Facebook had become the way we communicated efficiently with everyone. But, how could I expect my kids to want to be on a platform where their Black family is hurling insults indirectly at their white family and vice versa?
I decided to step in and talk to the adults. I published a series of posts that reminded everyone that the kids are biracial and that one is a part of the LGBTQ community — and that the memes and GIFS that are meant to be political are actually painful. I asked everyone to be mindful. I even called my dad and asked him to help spread the word. He tried. My husband went to his family with the same message.
But instead of the adults limiting their meme warfare, they increased it, along with lengthy posts justifying the material that was so hurtful to my kids.
“Why is this racist? I didn’t say the N-word. I didn’t call anybody anything,” was followed by a diatribe about how Black people were no longer oppressed and racism was not a “thing.”
Since the adults wouldn’t listen, I decided I had to protect my daughters from them. I told my girls that they were not responsible for the hate speech and stupidity their relatives were lobbing at one another. They were only responsible for their own actions and their own well-being.
“Unfollow, unfriend or even block a family member whose posts become too much to bear. Feel free to cut ties with the families at war on these timelines. We can reconnect with everyone after the election.”
(Unfortunately, many of the family members are still blocked and unfriended, as the rhetoric has not died down.)
If the adults in the family don’t see eye to eye, that is something they must deal with. American race relations are too complex and cut way too deep to be resolved by biracial people alone. It’s also a history that can’t be reconciled until everyone is ready to recognize their responsibility in the healing.