Setting the Tone

Why Create a Bond?

As explained above, hearing opposing viewpoints makes us feel threatened, unsafe. In order to be vulnerable, especially in a situation we perceive as threatening, we have to have a safe home base to return to. In this case, that safe place, is the care of a relationship. Think about how babies and young children are when they first begin to wander away from their caretakers: when they feel the safety of their caretaker's watchful eye, they will take big risks, like jumping off playground equipment or trying something new. As Lea Roth of Spring Up said, "People who are stuck in patterns of lashing out and harming folks, a lot of times that comes from a place of feeling like you're not seen and held and loved as a person." If we can see and hold and love a person who is causing harm, that care will allow them the space to take the risk of listening to a "threatening" view and perhaps even take accountability. To believe in someone's core intention to be good is to believe that they have the potential to be better than their worst actions.

Meanwhile, it is important to keep that balance between support and accountability. Martina Kartman of Collective Justice said, "It's this balance between really rigorous challenge, like really being able to stop, tell a person that that behavior is not okay, you need to cut that out, we need to be able to talk about it. And it's also like deep love, and commitment, and time, and energy, that goes into really walking with someone through accountability." You can't have accountability without care because accountability is internal work. We cannot do internal work for another person, but we can walk alongside them and hold out a hand as they do this work. This balance allows people to hear the accountability without being threatened by it. In fact, many of the fears that drive folks to buy into harmful political rhetoric is the fear that others don't care for them. The rhetoric of capitalism (let alone right-wing conservatism and Trumpism) suggests resources and freedom are finite, which means if someone else has them, others must lack them. Folks can feel like no one cares if they hurt or struggle, so why should they care if others do? (Stas Schmiedt, Spring Up) By building a caring bond, you can demonstrate that you are able to care about your conversational partner's feelings, while still prioritizing the hurt of those who they are harming.

Having a bond also means that you and your conversational partner exist outside the conflict at hand. This can be helpful for a few reasons:

1. It allows you to work through smaller conflicts (disagreements about what show to watch or how well something has been cleaned) that help you practice coming back from a conflict to your caring relationship.

2. It means that when you take breaks or space from these hard conversations, you can return to the love and care you have for each other.

3. You have a connection to each other, which gives finding resolutions much higher stakes. The relationship is at risk and you both, likely, hope to repair, save, or maintain it.

But What If I Hate Them?

This is a complicated question. The first place to start is to question whether you hate them or you hate their behavior and beliefs. If it's their beliefs and behaviors that make you so enraged, return to the part of you loves them. Dig deep to remember what makes you care about them. Wanting to support a person's transformation must come from a desire to help them, not a desire to extinguish them. Remember that beliefs are externally influenced by the societal forces and experiences that mold us. They are not innate.

Contrarily, if you answered that it is the person, not their beliefs or behaviors, that you abhor, then you're not the right person to support them in their transformation. Adrienne Maree Brown of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute said that if we cannot see a person's transformative capacity, we cannot support their transformative process. She says, "That means, for me, that's not my work."

Often, we want to be able to shun people and cut off relationships, while still seeing accountability and justice. Those two ideals are impossible unless someone is supporting the accountability work. And it is work. While we can call someone out on their behavior and walk away, if they do not have the support network to reflect on that harm, consider different options, work through tough feelings of guilt and shame, and have the opportunity to rebirth the way they move in the world, they will not truly change. What better person to guide this change than someone who has done the harm (and, White folks, we all definitely have, and likely still do, at times) and is working on growing this way themselves?

Connecting as Equals

Since our beliefs are often connected to our moral identity, as in we believe our beliefs make us good, we also believe that those who believe the opposite are bad. So when we come into conversation with those who believe starkly different things than we do, we often enter the conversation believing we are above them. In fact, after the election, many White folks were tempted to divest from Whiteness. Many White folks essentially said, "If Whiteness caused this, then I no longer want any part of it, because I would never want this to happen." However, we must recognize that within each of us is the potential to harm, especially because we all have been shaped by being raised in a White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Coming into a conversation with the belief that you are better than someone else won't work. You must come in as equals.

So take a moment to think about a time when you felt defensive. Not a time when you did the right thing and came around to the correction you were given, but a time before you considered yourself anti-racist. Perhaps you're thinking of a moment where someone corrected you or called you out on a topic you're less knowledgeable about, like Trans rights or Indigenous rights. Think about the way that felt in your mind. Were you blind with rage? Did you panic and try to replay all your past interactions? Think also about the way it felt in your body. Did you stiffen? Did you get hot? Did your heart rate rise? We've all made a mistake that made us feel guilty, defensive, and filled with hot shame. This is where you can connect with your conversational partner, no matter how extreme their responses or beliefs may seem.

Vulnerability engenders an environment where vulnerability is acceptable. If you are able to bring the vulnerability of acknowledging where you started in your anti-racist beliefs, the times you have caused harm, the ways you are still learning, and the guilt and shame and defensiveness you have felt, your conversation partner is likely to be more willing to experience and work through those challenges. Acknowledging these things recognizes that we are all human and harm is a human capability. It recognizes that this work is challenging and emotional and takes a long time. Those acknowledgements allow us to build compassion for the process our conversational partner is about to embark on, and adjust our expectations for how long it will take. As Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions said, "We can't expect people to change right away. Who does? If any one of us looks at our own behavior, it often took a long time to make change, we were often offended when somebody actually confronted us." This is human and we have to enter into the conversation as two humans who care for each other.