Unwoke Relatives: People Get Real About Their Ignorant Family Members

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Christmas and New Year’s Eve are around the corner and while it’s the most wonderful time of year, for some, it means visiting family members they’d rather avoid.

Just before the holidays hit, Vice compiled a few horror stories about those infuriating relatives—for example, the sexist father who only understands sexism as it pertains to his own daughter.

Start off with a story from Maria below then hit the flip for more.

Maria, 32

I was at my family’s lake house for my annual vacation from stress. There’s no cell service there and no wifi, so unless you tune into local radio on an actual radio, there’s no way to know about what’s going on in the world. A few years before this trip I’d blissfully basked in a lounge chair in the sun and I didn’t even know that Amy Winehouse had died until several days later. It means escape.

It also means a lot of swimming, napping, reading, eating, drinking, and quality time with just the family. I was with my parents and my grandmother. She was a very cool person and I always loved getting to spend time with her. Funny, fun and up to talk about anything. It was a heatwave, fires were burning nearby and we were eating our late-afternoon meal of chips and cheese on the patio. We’d also been drinking for a few hours to stave off the heat and also because we like beer.

As a Vancouver resident we were talking about what everyone can never shut up about: real estate and housing. Because I’m not a rich person I don’t own a home, I rent. And to my grandmother, this seemed unfair.

“Why can’t you own a home?” she asked.

“Because they’re really expensive.”

“Well, we all know why.”

And then I took another sip of beer because I could only imagine what was coming next. At this point, my mom looks nervous, unsure if my calm side or angry side is going to emerge.

“All of these Orientals. They’re buying up everything and ruining the housing market,” she said.

I know nothing about the housing market. I’m no real estate genius, and I basically know nothing about how money works if it isn’t a transaction to purchase a new romper. But I do know that this was super racist. At first I go the reasonable route.

“I know you’re from a different generation, but you can’t say that… What about rich white people?” I ask.

“We’re not talking about them.” Without missing a beat she goes headlong into a diatribe about rich Asian people ruining the city with their money. I barely register what she’s saying. I gulp my beer down fast.

I finish my drink and toss the beer can over the railing and start flailing my arms wildly. I can’t help myself from screaming and I knock over my chair as I get up.

“YOU’RE BEING RACIST! YOU’RE A BIGOT!”

Shaking and buzzing I storm off down to the dock and dive through the smoky air into the cool lake. By the time we fire up the BBQ dinner later on everyone is pleasant, but I had to tread water for a long time to get there.

Natalie

I’ve had a few sparring matches with pretty much everyone in my immediate family, but my dad is a classic troll and will say things deliberately to offend my mom or me. I’ve had varying degrees of success when dealing with him.

The most successful time was when he started making jokes about Rihanna having been assaulted. I scrunched up my face, gestured to my partner, and said, “Would that be funny if he did it to me?” and my dad shut up. The idea somehow hadn’t occurred to him. I try to avoid the whole “she’s somebody’s daughter” rhetoric, since it’s a compromise to have to appeal to his love for me to get him to show basic respect for someone else. But I think it worked because he knew from the beginning that what he was saying was wrong and that the callousness of it was the whole joke. My question made it impossible for him to remove his emotions from it, and I think made him acknowledge that the situation was different to him because she was a black woman. He hasn’t made as much as a Honeymooners reference since.

The least successful was at the dinner table after he had made a comment about some women he worked with. I grilled him on what he meant by it (“What do you mean when you call them ‘your girls’? Who do you mean when you say ‘they’re all’ hard working?”) until it escalated to him accusing me of being judgmental and too sensitive and me accusing him of being racist, sexist, and patronizing. He went out for a rage smoke and when he came back I loudly explained Sara Ahmed’s writing about the Feminist Killjoy to my mother without looking at him. This somehow did not open his mind to criticism.

Audrey, 27

Once, my uncle made a bad joke during Patricia Arquette’s winning Oscar speech for the movie Boyhood when she dedicated her award to single mothers. My cousins and aunts and I rolled our eyes at the joke (which was something along the lines of boohoo, cat-ladies divorced everywhere have it so hard with incoming alimony, child support etc). We paused the show (Thank God for PVR Pause so we didn’t miss any Chris Rock hosting moments), explaining that single motherhood is nothing to poke fun at and it isn’t pathetic or attention-seeking for Arquette to shed light on this. It was a moment of raw, genuine reaction from both parties and ended up being a good discussion about feminism, jokes at others’ expenses and empathy. I stress-ate a lot of tostitos and salsa afterwards but it was well worth it.

Head over to Vice for more holiday horror stories.