Thanksgiving is a few days away, and Christmas is approaching. While the holidays are usually rooted in love, family, and togetherness, they can also be a trying time, as differences of opinion can cause discord, especially after a pivotal election season. However, with healthy communication, understanding, and active listening, the most challenging conversations can be approached with dignity and respect. Brit Barron, a motivational speaker, teacher, and storyteller, is here to help us broach those difficult conversations while holding onto our deepest convictions without losing relationships with those we love. In her recently released book, DO YOU STILL TALK TO GRANDMA?
Barron draws readers into this tension between relationship and accountability by highlighting how we navigate relationships with people we love and disagree with. Sharing painful experiences from her own life, such as her parent’s divorce and belonging to a faith community that sided with the forces that dehumanize BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks, she illuminates the challenges and hopes for these relationships, showing that the best research points toward humility, self-awareness, an openness to learning, and remembering that others can learn too.
We spoke to Barron about safely navigating the feelings of disappointment and frustration with people we love but disagree with. Read more of our conversation below.
ESSENCE: So why did you create this book, and what was your intention?
Brit Barron: I started working on this project in 2021, and one of the questions driving it was, what’s on the other side of cancel culture? I saw a world where we were being encouraged to cut off anyone who disagreed with us, and I didn’t think that was the best way to move forward together.
In what ways could we still love the problematic people in our lives while still having boundaries?
The number one thing we can do to help us stay in relationships is reject binary thinking, which is the idea that there are black-and-white outcomes. You can be entirely on one side of the line, and someone can be ultimately on the other, and it’s a reminder that more than one thing can be accurate at the same time. And if we can hold that for first ourselves, then we can keep that for people in our lives. The second most important thing we can do is enact empathy again, first for ourselves. If we can empathize with the different versions of ourselves that we have experienced, then we can be good to have empathy for the people around us.
When should we cut off family members? Or should we ever resort to doing that?
Yeah, so obviously, yes, there are times when we need to be no contact. There are times when a level of disrespect or abuse or a toxic environment will cause us to do that. And I trust that people will be able to know that. I have family members with whom I’ve gotten in contact. I have friends who have done that, and it is tricky to do something we should approach with lots of intention, but absolutely, there’s room for that.
When it comes to being Black women, there is a level of guilt that we feel around bringing up difficult conversations with our family members; as we talked about recently, we do feel like we have this loaded responsibility to keep the family together at every cost.
We feel that more than other folks and other folks in our families, and it is a reminder that our work is first for ourselves. Hence, our boundaries, empathy, kindness, and everything we give should come first to ourselves. When we can empathize with other people, we realize that maybe we’re not the ones to get them to where they need to go. So, even with people in my life who I no longer speak to, I still hope that someone comes into their life who they can hear from because I’ve recognized that it’s not me. I can let go of that responsibility while still holding on to help for whatever liberation might come their way.
And what are some frameworks you provide in the book that can help us approach difficult conversations?
Rejection of binary thinking, empathy, and establishing healthy boundaries are critical and necessary, as well as enacting curiosity. Suppose you don’t want to have those conversations. In that case, I think being on the offense and not the defense and trying to set some boundaries up ahead of time to say, “Hey, I’m excited to be with everyone, but I don’t have it for the political conversations.” And if it starts going that way, excusing yourself may be helpful.
We recently talked about feeling comfortable with confrontation or direct communication. How important is that for the holidays with your family?
It’s imperative. Our ability to communicate directly, not be afraid of conflict, and not be scared of these things, but to see them as tools that can help us get to where we go is so helpful. And I think as black women in particular, sometimes we have specific ideas around how we may want, not want, to come off, or ideas around these types of conversations, or other people’s perceptions of them. Still, I spent a lot of time trying to undo the reality that if something is hard, it’s terrible. I don’t think that’s true anymore. The things I value the most in life come the hard way. They went through a difficult moment, a difficult conversation, a conflict within myself, whatever it was. And so sometimes, when a conversation feels like I need to be direct, it feels challenging to communicate. I remind myself that that doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong.
How can we safely navigate the feelings of disappointment and frustration with people we love but disagree with?
We should allow ourselves to hold more than one truth simultaneously. So many of us, especially Black women, are well-versed in this in many ways. Most of us understand this when we think about our feelings about America, right? We hate it here. I have endless critiques for this place, and there are also parts of it that I love, and my job is not to figure out which one wins. It’s to let them both be true. And so when we look at our family members as we’ve headed to the holidays, we have people that we love, have been there for us, have memories, and have picked us up from school or helped us get ready for prom. We have deep disappointment with the ways that they have voted or things that they have said, and our job isn’t for one of those to win; it is to allow both of those to be accurate and for that to shape then how we engage over the holidays.
