WHY I’M LETTING MY KIDS BLOCK FAMILY ON FACEBOOK

Having your children block or even unfriend members of your family is okay if it means protecting them from petty politics

I NOTICED the shift in “atmosphere” on Facebook sometime during 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, tie-breaker 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. Even the chat function was hazardous as relatives spammed chain messages besmirching the presidential candidate opposing their own.

My oldest waded into a few conversations and found herself too overwhelmed by the rhetoric to continue commenting. “Mommy, I am telling them how this is wrong – they are wrong – and they don’t want to listen.”

The girls also described how scrolling through their timelines meant wading through a couple dozen anti-liberal, anti-black posts. It was nearly impossible to find a post about the big buck Granddad just shot or photos of a cousin’s new baby.

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”.

“This is the world we live in, and if you want to hide from it, then block me!” This surprised me. It was followed by a post against black men and women marrying outside their race. This was from a distant relative on my side of the family.

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.” I was not going to see my kids mentally scarred by family members who refused to see points of view outside their own.

Today, many of my family members only see posts from my kids if I share them on my wall. The same with my husband’s family. 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 recognise their responsibility in the healing.