How Can I Make My Partner’s Parents More Woke?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/how-can-i-make-my-partners-parents-more-woke.html

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My partner’s parents recently visited us in the relatively diverse area of the Northeast where I was raised and work. I am a first-generation Filipino-American. My partner’s parents grew up in the white suburbia of the Midwest. During their visit, they casually dropped some microaggressions. His mother said that she “could tell Filipinos apart” from other Asians (though she can’t tell Chinese, Japanese and Koreans apart). I told her that not even I could tell them apart given the diverse phenotypes in the region. His father later confused my sister with another Filipina, and then explained that if you put all of us in a room my sister looked most related to her. I spent time unpacking these and many similar statements (which were offensive not just to me but also to other minority populations) with my partner, who was very understanding and embarrassed. He explained to his mother why such remarks from the dominant culture come off as offensive. She was defensive at first, asserting she is “not a racist,” but eventually understood.

I feel it’s important to continue this conversation to help them identify microaggressions. Should he talk to them? To what extent should I be involved and responsible? Name Withheld

You’re asking two related questions. One is about your partner’s responsibility for edifying his parents. The other is about your role, as his partner, in assisting. Clearly, he has the knowledge and the standing to take the lead here. They’ll care what he thinks, and he has had a lifetime of learning to deal with his parents. Your job is going to be to take a supporting role.

Your partner has a couple of reasons to keep working on his parents. One is that we should all want those we love to be better people, less prone to giving unintended offense. The other is that diminishing the amount of racial insensitivity in the world makes it better for all of us. The first of these reasons is limited to those he is close to; the second, of course, gives him (and you) grounds for trying to work on anybody you can help in this way.

But getting people to grasp how these sorts of remarks can be received is seldom accomplished in a moment. And you’re not conducting a new-student orientation. If your approach is simply condescending or censorious, the ratio of hurt to learning will be high. (That would be true at a new-student orientation too!) Like all of us, this couple is the product of an environment for which they are not responsible. And people visiting the Northeast from Midwestern suburbia may not feel that they represent the dominant culture.

Nor is it helpful to assume the worst of them. Note, for instance, that the “they look alike” problem — known in the social-science literature as the “other-race effect” — isn’t specifically a white thing. (It isn’t a middle-aged thing, either: Nine-month-old infants display it.) Members of a nonwhite community, researchers say, can have a hard time distinguishing among white faces, as well as vice versa. In one study, Asian-American subjects were more likely to mix up black faces than they were to confuse white ones. That doesn’t reveal a special Asian-American bias against black people; probably, it just reflects the relative frequency with which the subjects interacted with them. The lesson is that if we’re going to attend to the micro, we might also attend to the macro.

Here we’ve got a middle-aged Midwestern couple trying to find common ground with a young person from the East Coast, and yes, doing so in a ham-handed way. They have much to learn from you. But be open to the possibility that you might have something to learn from them. Conversations go better when both parties do some listening. So you might start by recognizing that their attitudes most likely reflect ignorance rather than malice — and by cutting them some slack.

I am the executive director of a small nonprofit association. Our board is elected by our membership. We allow any member in good standing to be placed on the ballot.

One member who wishes to run for our board is the ex-husband of a family friend. For this reason, I know that this man brutally beat his wife for years before she finally divorced him. I can’t unknow this. Of course, I do not want this man on my board, and I certainly don’t want to elevate him professionally; it is prestigious in this industry to be or have been on our elected leadership team. He’s planning on running next year. I am at a loss. Name Withheld

You don’t say anything about what the nonprofit you run does. But whatever it is, the membership is very unlikely to want a person with this history on its board. So there are two questions to ask: Do your members have the right to know? And do you have the right, or perhaps even the duty, to tell them?

Whether they have the right to know depends, first, on whether their disinclination to support someone guilty of spousal abuse is reasonable. If they wouldn’t vote for someone who is Muslim, they shouldn’t be told that a candidate is of this creed, because it would permit them to act out of prejudice. That you should not assault your wife, however, is uncontroversial. Equally uncontroversial is the proposition that a man who does so is, for that reason alone, dishonorable. Because serving on the board is an honor, refusing a spouse-abuser a place there is entirely reasonable.

But the fact that people are entitled to know his history doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to tell them. A relevant consideration is whether you were told this with the reasonable expectation that you wouldn’t pass it on. Respect for confidences is important; without it, people would sit on information they would do better to share in a limited way. That doesn’t mean that having promised to keep something secret settles the matter. Keeping a secret can be wrong when the result would be to risk serious harm to others. That consideration may not apply here; more to the point, you don’t suggest the information was passed on in confidence. This leaves you free to make these facts known.

Still, a problem remains. This is sensitive information, and you’re circulating it in order to affect the makeup of the board to which you report. Executive directors do this all the time, of course, but it undermines the ideal of an independent board. So I’m inclined to think the best thing is to tell the board what you know. Its job is to look out for the interests of the organization. How the directors handle the situation is a matter for them.