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.
