like & subscribe if you accidentally called your family racist this Thanksgiving

like & subscribe again if your dad came into your Warby Parker store and bought glasses and then didn't leave you a stellar review after

RT if you are happy that Thanksgiving is over! By RT, I mean let me know if you cried during Thanksgiving!

I have a lot of feelings about the whole vibe of Thanksgiving. The pros and cons of being with a bunch of your family for one whole day are that you get to see a lot of your family after a long and heavy year and also that you get to scream and fight with your family about if all white people are racist — you can decide which is a pro and which is a con. A fun addition to all of this is that I had the most incredible opportunity to be, yet again, the only vegan at my Thanksgiving — always a beautiful thing. That really just means that I get to make whatever food I want to eat, and I also get to have people look at my non-dairy mashed potatoes like they’re the strangest dish on the table. Huge fan of Thanksgiving.

This time, the arguments about politics changed for me. Every year before, I usually agreed with my family’s liberal opinions (or just didn’t know enough to argue them) and enjoyed the debating and ~argumentatatating~ because we were all pretty much agreeing, even if we couldn’t tell that we were. This time, I walked into Stamford, Connecticut as a radicalized, Socialist, 5-foot-2, 24-year-old and knew that was going to be held against me — more specifically the 5-foot-2 part.

My first mistake was saying that Democrats and Republicans are not so different. I didn’t think about how important being a Democrat over a Republican is to my family (yes I did I just didn’t care). Starting off that way made it so that no one was going to take whatever I said seriously (also want to clarify that I love my family and know they mean well I’m just cooler than all of them. For the family members who subscribe to this newsletter: this is a joke?). Saying the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans in my family is like saying the pope is as bad as Hitler. It’s like saying Classico pasta sauce tastes just like Rao’s pasta sauce. I think my first analogy was better.

My second mistake was responding to my family discussing critical race theory with this:

~ i think all white people have racist tendencies ~

To them, that meant that I said that they’re all racist. Hitlers! All of them! Based on how they reacted, that’s totally what I could’ve said. White people don’t like to hear that they’re part of racism, even though they’re not members of the Ku Klux Klan. I’m taking this sentence from someone I spoke to about it all, to which they replied that it is really tricky work getting people to understand implicit bias and how they’re part of the dominant culture and are thereby the direct beneficiaries of racism. Liberal white people do not like to feel guilty. They didn’t vote for Trump, so they didn’t do anything wrong! Irish people had it hard, too, that one time, even though they don’t have it hard anymore! It’s not just white people who are racist, Kerry!

I don’t want to use this as an excuse for why I couldn’t stand up for myself and my beliefs that night, but after the silly little year I had, I am more emotionally unavailable than I thought I was. I couldn’t handle getting interrupted just to hear someone tell me that what I’m saying is dumb over and over again. I couldn’t handle it being everyone in the room telling me that I’m being so closed-minded about it all. I was so tired that I left the room and cried for 45 minutes. It probably would’ve been even longer, but I previously had five glasses of natural wine that helped bury my emotions for a little longer. Quite the lil baby hangover at work the next morning, but that’s showbiz, baby.

Again, I think that’s a childish excuse for not being able to stand up for what I believe in. I’ve had this conversation with family members so many times and have given them the receipts they’re looking for when they don’t believe in my progressive point-of-view that this time — whenever they asked me to look up what I was talking about so that they had proof I knew what I was talking about — I just scrolled through Instagram or finished another Duo Lingo lesson until they forgot they asked me to do that. I couldn’t even get myself to grab the receipts I had bookmarked in my Google Chrome app. It didn’t matter enough to me to continue fighting. We don’t hear each other anyway when we’re just waiting to speak.

I guess I’m writing all of this in this week’s newsletter because I have a question for all of you: how do I continue these conversations in a better way? My aunts and uncles kept asking me this weekend what it is I thought they were supposed to do to help stop all of the racism and the conservatism and the ignorance. My answer to that is that it starts with your family — getting everyone to listen to the different points of view until we all realize that we aren’t helping when we’re constantly feeling defensive and triggered by the idea that we are benefitting from it all. But how do I re-word it all so that it doesn’t sound like I’m accusing? How do I continue to stand my ground without shouting over everyone so that my voice is heard? Also, what is a better analogy than Classico vs. Rao? Do I keep mentioning that Hitler is bad in my newsletters so that people know I think Hitler is bad? You can all decide which question is most important.

I do feel like I said my piece at Thanksgiving. I also feel like the piece of vegan pumpkin pie that I ate was not fully cooked and is probably why I almost threw up in my Uber home. It was definitely not because of the five glasses of natural wine. We are a pro-natural wine community here at Kerry’s Newsletter also known as Circle Back. But if anyone has any answers or thoughts in response to my questions, please hit me the frick up. It’s taking too long for all of us (white people) to understand that we’re part of the problem if we continue to believe that racism is only if you support the KKK and not when you compare Irish hatred in the 1920s to the murdering of people of color in 2021.

Anyway, we’ll all figure this out. I don’t know how to end this one this week, so I’ll let Cher do the honors: