Putting Aristotle to rest in my family’s living room?
My family loves to argue. This is especially true of my immediate family and my extended maternal family. Those of us with loud voices and big opinions outweigh those who prefer to stay silent. The strength of our convictions and the mountains we are willing to die on are not dictated by education, lived experience, or even the importance of the subject. Every argument is passionately fought, every point is picked apart – most of these discussions devolve into screaming matches.
I have done quite a bit of competitive and academic debate outside of my familial dynamic, this has had absolutely no impact on my skill in the domestic arena. The rules are different, victories are rare but angry tears are plentiful. It has taken me 19 years of arguing with my brother for us to find common ground.
I moved out when I was 17 years old to go to University. None of my post-secondary choices were in the same city as my family; this was by design. The oldest of five children, I was attempting to simultaneously reclaim my childhood and assert my adulthood. 17-year-old me knew that there were parts of myself that needed growth and support that I couldn’t find at home, and I am endlessly grateful for the choices I made for myself at that age. I began a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with a concentration in Global Politics in 2015 and became involved in student activism and advocacy in 2016. I think that it’s important for me to constantly remind myself that my entry to community work, advocacy, and support was through post-secondary institutions. The people that dominated these spaces were students, and so much of the work we do is centered around inherently exclusionary institutions. I find myself being grateful that I’ve met so many racialized queer students like myself, whilst finding that the communities we’ve built often don’t overlap with the communities I’m from. The language that fills these spaces are carefully (and sometimes not so carefully) plucked from political theory, and recontextualized within our social and political circles. And the more we learn - the more we are able to put a name to our experiences, or relationships and our political ideologies. And the more we create new barriers to accessing our community.
I feel very lucky that I can articulate my socio-political opinions and beliefs with conviction. I feel very lucky to have social circles that reflect many of these same beliefs – and to have personal relationships in which these beliefs are upheld and affirmed. Being surrounded by incredible people that are taking all sorts of actions to advocate for and support their communities inspires me. Being in these spaces makes me hopeful for a political future that is better, most of the time.
Arguing with my family reminds me of the insularity and subjectivity of my language and my priorities. Three weeks ago, I offhandedly mentioned to my 14-year-old brother that billionaires should not exist. This statement is not something that is disputed by the people closest to me. But this same statement triggered two separate and intense dialogues with my immediate family. The latter of which was a nearly three-hour argument between my siblings and mother.
Miraculously this argument did not end in tears. Sometime after the second hour and around the time that the Chinese food had been delivered, I temporarily tapped out – agreeing to disagree. Admittedly this was quite uncharacteristic for me, but I was hungry and really sitting with the realization that I wasn’t capable of changing people’s mind if they didn’t want their mind to be changed. But then, I waded back in, from a different angle. Not trying to convince my brother of anything. Instead with full compassion for his placement of himself in this narrative. What does it mean to my brother, a 20-year-old black man (it’s still weird to think of myself as a man as opposed to a little boy) who was raised in a low-income household, to hear that billionaires shouldn’t exist? What does a value statement like that mean in his life? I can’t and won’t speak to his political beliefs – I don’t think he would appreciate it, and I don’t think it’s my place. But what I realized is that we didn’t disagree on the disparity (even though I think that there was still some scope that needed to be acknowledged) in wealth in the world. We didn’t disagree on who was harmed by that disparity. We clashed in our understandings of short-term harm reductions, whether those in power would capitulate to radical change, and what tactics would serve us best - these are also disagreements that I see within my social and academic circles.
My 14-year- old brother asked me, what I wanted. I think that he was looking for a body of politic to believe in. Maybe he wanted some of my conviction. I think he was surprised when I said I didn’t know – and that he shouldn’t trust anyone who has a singular idea for the future encapsulated in their mind. And then I maybe devolved into a bit of a rant about how the political spectrum could be thought of as a circle and that authoritarianism of any sort is destructive. But emerging from my digression I realized that my 20-year-old-brother was chiming in in agreement. He explained that any sort of political decision-making body should not be based on the ideas of the individual but the needs of the collective. It was at that moment that I realized that up until that point I had believed I knew more than him. Still thinking of him as my kid brother and internalizing a lot of academic superiority. And perhaps these feelings had served me once in fighting internal dynamics of misogyny – but they couldn’t serve me any longer. They were destructive to unity in my family and in my community.
What does it say that my desire was to convince them, and to make them understand? Where was the kinship or community in my belief that I could only teach and not learn? I know very different things from my family, but I don’t know more than them. Their ideas of the future are not less critical to necessary political change than mine. I cannot believe in a revolution that must be translated to the people I love; I believe in one that they have dictated for themselves. Their ideas will colour and broaden my political imagination, because my family exists in all the best versions of the future. Non-university educated black people exist in the future. And in the best versions of this future this does not make them less than, this is not a mark of being disadvantaged or lacking or deserving of less than people who have chosen to seek knowledge and credentials in institutions. It is simply one of the many ways of being.
This doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on everything, just the opposite. And this doesn’t fully engage with the complicated dynamics of language (my family speaks varying levels of Jamaican patois, and African American Vernacular English – two languages that have historically been dismissed as legitimate forms of communication), or queerness (my desire to live a life in which I can live and be wholly who I am is increasingly becoming more and more non-negotiable). But it has made me more hopeful about my ability to have a relationship with my siblings in which my life is not separate from theirs. Their hopes, dreams, and experiences which are similar but still vastly different from mine will be central to my ever-evolving political praxis. But I don’t see how we get from here to there without ongoing discussion. I can’t allow myself or the people I love to exist unchallenged by each other. So, in short – I think that that means I have to keep arguing with my family.
(Written sometime in January 2021)
