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Do You Still Talk to Grandma?: When the Problematic People in Our Lives Are the Ones We Love
Renowned motivational speaker, teacher, and storyteller Brit Barron offers a path to holding on to our deepest convictions without losing relationships with the people we love.
“This book is so needed in a time when we are fresh off cancel culture and ready for a new way to process and interact with those with whom we don’t agree—whether virtually or in real life.”—Joy Cho, author and founder of Oh Joy!
Brit Barron gets it. Those people who hurt us with their bigotry and ignorance . . . they’re often the people we They’re our friends, our parents, our grandparents, and even our religious leaders. And what we want is for them to grow, not to be canceled by an online mob. So what can it look like to strive for justice without causing new harm or giving up on the people we love? Barron shows that the way forward is to create a gracious and risky space for people to learn and evolve. We need to form the sorts of relationships where we can tell difficult truths, set boundaries, forgive, and share stories of our own failings. And this starts with examining ourselves.
In Do You Still Talk to Grandma?, Barron draws readers into this tension between relationship and accountability, sharing painful experiences from her own life, such as her parents’ divorce and belonging to a faith community that sided with the forces that dehumanize BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks. Barron illuminates the challenges and hope for these relationships, showing that the best research points toward humility, self-awareness, an openness to learning, and remembering that others can learn too.
Barron envisions a redemptive way of being that allows progressives to love people who say or believe problematic things without sacrificing themselves, their values, or their beliefs. Provocative, charming, and vulnerable, Do You Still Talk to Grandma? is an essential read for anyone struggling to live compassionately without giving up on conviction.
“This book is so needed in a time when we are fresh off cancel culture and ready for a new way to process and interact with those with whom we don’t agree—whether virtually or in real life.”—Joy Cho, author and founder of Oh Joy!
Brit Barron gets it. Those people who hurt us with their bigotry and ignorance . . . they’re often the people we They’re our friends, our parents, our grandparents, and even our religious leaders. And what we want is for them to grow, not to be canceled by an online mob. So what can it look like to strive for justice without causing new harm or giving up on the people we love? Barron shows that the way forward is to create a gracious and risky space for people to learn and evolve. We need to form the sorts of relationships where we can tell difficult truths, set boundaries, forgive, and share stories of our own failings. And this starts with examining ourselves.
In Do You Still Talk to Grandma?, Barron draws readers into this tension between relationship and accountability, sharing painful experiences from her own life, such as her parents’ divorce and belonging to a faith community that sided with the forces that dehumanize BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks. Barron illuminates the challenges and hope for these relationships, showing that the best research points toward humility, self-awareness, an openness to learning, and remembering that others can learn too.
Barron envisions a redemptive way of being that allows progressives to love people who say or believe problematic things without sacrificing themselves, their values, or their beliefs. Provocative, charming, and vulnerable, Do You Still Talk to Grandma? is an essential read for anyone struggling to live compassionately without giving up on conviction.
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First published October 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
December 15, 2024
Author lightly touches on topics important to society as of the time it was written, and though it was published this year, it's hard for me to imagine we still care about these matters when the 2024 election results say differently. Maybe this book was written for me, in this sense, because I'm experiencing pain, betrayal, shock, and so much more still and probably will continue to do so for many years to come. Forgiveness is an ongoing process, just like grief - I mean, after my parents died, I didn't only grieve for an acceptable set period, but I grieve every day, even if that grief looks different and feels different every day. It doesn't always hurt, but my longing for them is ever present. In that same vein of preserving relationships and grieving the past while trying to strengthen the future, I am trying hard to forgive the people in my life that I still want to love and respect but who voted MAGA. I'm still trying to find a way to stay connected to them, because their vote isn't all who they are. I'm still trying to remember why were friends in the first place.
What zinged me the most was the quote from Richard Rohr about how if we don't transform our pain, we end up transmitting it. I guess that's a different way of saying how hurt people, hurt people. Now I have to ask myself how I will end up transforming my pain so that I avoid transmitting it. How do I find peace rather than let the chaos in my heart spill out. I'm working it out in therapy, but my goodness, it still sucks major rotten eggs!
What zinged me the most was the quote from Richard Rohr about how if we don't transform our pain, we end up transmitting it. I guess that's a different way of saying how hurt people, hurt people. Now I have to ask myself how I will end up transforming my pain so that I avoid transmitting it. How do I find peace rather than let the chaos in my heart spill out. I'm working it out in therapy, but my goodness, it still sucks major rotten eggs!
August 9, 2024
(arc)
There are some WONDERFUL things about this book. I deeply appreciate the meditation on finding space between consequences & cancellation. I love the humor & personal anecdotes alongside citations of theory and research.
However, in the end it felt unfinished & more akin to a collection of blog posts or speeches rather than a cohesive collection of essays with a thruline.
I look forward to continuing to read works by this author in the future.
One note: if you’re not familiar with Barrons work it’s worth mentioning that Christianity factors into the writing.
There are some WONDERFUL things about this book. I deeply appreciate the meditation on finding space between consequences & cancellation. I love the humor & personal anecdotes alongside citations of theory and research.
However, in the end it felt unfinished & more akin to a collection of blog posts or speeches rather than a cohesive collection of essays with a thruline.
I look forward to continuing to read works by this author in the future.
One note: if you’re not familiar with Barrons work it’s worth mentioning that Christianity factors into the writing.
Read
December 3, 2024DNF. It's not you, Brit Barron, it's me. This wasn't quite the book I was expecting going into it, and that's on me for not researching the author ahead of time.
Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.
———
bookstagram | booktok | blog | storygraph
Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.
———
bookstagram | booktok | blog | storygraph
November 18, 2024
Valid points were certainly made but the book was not as interesting and eye opening as I hoped. Also, the author is a pastor and when I started reading it, I should known it’d be too heavy on religion for me.
September 28, 2025
This book should be mandatory reading for everyone. She put words and structure to a lot of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling in me for a long time.
November 25, 2024
Brit Barron is awesome. I loved her thought process, her nuance in navigating really murky issues, the way she’s committed to justice but also doesn’t fall into binary thinking—it’s all awesome and super helpful.
I felt like a lot of what she talks about in this book are truths and stories we all (specifically people who are left-leaning or identify as “progressive”) need to hear. She explores how truths like the fact the internet, well, isn’t real life, but more specifically, that the way we’ve been trained to interact with people around us on the internet has totally invaded the way we interact with REAL FUCKING PEOPLE around us. These are all things we know already, right? But we don’t necessarily have the words, stories, or ideas of how to move forward. Barron offers a lot of that and for that I’m very grateful to have read it. I’m tired of thinking I can’t believe in love justice, progress, and goodness, but also—I can’t talk to my fucking mom. My mom people!!!
And that’s where my biggest critique comes in.
I got this book because the title sort of sold me on something I’m particularly desperate for right now. My grandma’s dead, but my mom’s not. My dad’s not. But these are the people in my life that I don’t even know how to be my authentic self around because some of our deepest values seem to be at odds yet we don’t acknowledge it—or more we don’t know how. We both claim faith in the same God, yet I seem to be the only one aware that—really—these are very different gods. It’s really painful when you love these people that raised you and genuinely are loving people who have taught you so much, yet some of the views or ways of seeing the world they hold are really harmful! Harmful at times to the point of wanting to ask yourself, do I cut off my mom? How deep of a relationship can my dad and I really have? What this book taught and confirmed to me is the answer is no. Thank God! My parents are still my parents. Boundaries and consequences are important ways of moving forward, but these are merely concepts in this book. Or when the are fleshed out, it’s more about dealing with celebrities online… not to be frank but I could care less about celebrities online lol. Point being, I really wanted a practical “how to” in navigating these relationships. How do I *in practice* “talk to grandma” still?
This book offers incredible overarching concepts that I genuinely believe will help me love my parents better while holding my own and standing up for what I believe is right. However, Barron focuses more on these larger concepts and ideological frameworks that keep us from doing so. Don’t get me wrong, that is incredibly important and arguably, I probably needed to see these things before any practical change could happen. But I guess I’m just a little bummed. I realize that’s mainly on me, but hey, the title is quite alluring for people in my situation. I certainly loved learning how we should engage with celebrity cancel culture and real progress, but what about when I’m on the plane ride home and my mom is picking me up from the airport? What do I do when she tells me about how awesome her prayer group has been where all they do is pray for Israel and Donald Trump? Genuinely, what the FUCK do I do with that?
Maybe that’s a very unfair thing to put on any author. This is really for me to figure out. I really do believe the concepts here will help me navigate this odd liminal space, but I guess I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. Granted, what I was looking for is quite the stretch.
All in all, this book is incredibly helpful and Barron is an honest, funny, humble, and very smart person. I’m thankful I read this, and I feel like she would be so fun to talk to.
Thank you Brit!! Maybe you write a sequel dealing with the nitty gritty of personal relationships??👀
I felt like a lot of what she talks about in this book are truths and stories we all (specifically people who are left-leaning or identify as “progressive”) need to hear. She explores how truths like the fact the internet, well, isn’t real life, but more specifically, that the way we’ve been trained to interact with people around us on the internet has totally invaded the way we interact with REAL FUCKING PEOPLE around us. These are all things we know already, right? But we don’t necessarily have the words, stories, or ideas of how to move forward. Barron offers a lot of that and for that I’m very grateful to have read it. I’m tired of thinking I can’t believe in love justice, progress, and goodness, but also—I can’t talk to my fucking mom. My mom people!!!
And that’s where my biggest critique comes in.
I got this book because the title sort of sold me on something I’m particularly desperate for right now. My grandma’s dead, but my mom’s not. My dad’s not. But these are the people in my life that I don’t even know how to be my authentic self around because some of our deepest values seem to be at odds yet we don’t acknowledge it—or more we don’t know how. We both claim faith in the same God, yet I seem to be the only one aware that—really—these are very different gods. It’s really painful when you love these people that raised you and genuinely are loving people who have taught you so much, yet some of the views or ways of seeing the world they hold are really harmful! Harmful at times to the point of wanting to ask yourself, do I cut off my mom? How deep of a relationship can my dad and I really have? What this book taught and confirmed to me is the answer is no. Thank God! My parents are still my parents. Boundaries and consequences are important ways of moving forward, but these are merely concepts in this book. Or when the are fleshed out, it’s more about dealing with celebrities online… not to be frank but I could care less about celebrities online lol. Point being, I really wanted a practical “how to” in navigating these relationships. How do I *in practice* “talk to grandma” still?
This book offers incredible overarching concepts that I genuinely believe will help me love my parents better while holding my own and standing up for what I believe is right. However, Barron focuses more on these larger concepts and ideological frameworks that keep us from doing so. Don’t get me wrong, that is incredibly important and arguably, I probably needed to see these things before any practical change could happen. But I guess I’m just a little bummed. I realize that’s mainly on me, but hey, the title is quite alluring for people in my situation. I certainly loved learning how we should engage with celebrity cancel culture and real progress, but what about when I’m on the plane ride home and my mom is picking me up from the airport? What do I do when she tells me about how awesome her prayer group has been where all they do is pray for Israel and Donald Trump? Genuinely, what the FUCK do I do with that?
Maybe that’s a very unfair thing to put on any author. This is really for me to figure out. I really do believe the concepts here will help me navigate this odd liminal space, but I guess I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. Granted, what I was looking for is quite the stretch.
All in all, this book is incredibly helpful and Barron is an honest, funny, humble, and very smart person. I’m thankful I read this, and I feel like she would be so fun to talk to.
Thank you Brit!! Maybe you write a sequel dealing with the nitty gritty of personal relationships??👀
January 31, 2025
This book had so many powerful quotes. It spoke a lot about holding tension and nuance as one navigates complex relationships. Great book club read! Woohoo
September 29, 2025
3.75 rounding up to 4 ⭐️ - The title is misleading and I think the content feels a little bit thrown together like different blog posts. But I enjoyed reading this authors point of view and her comparisons of accountability vs annihilation and harm vs offense. While not what I was fully expecting, it was definitely thought provoking.
December 6, 2024
p. 42 ? something about i used to think that way, i've learned that language I used for a long time is no longer appropriate, let me know if you want a reading list that helped me get there?
"one driver of progressive amnesia is our desire to bypass our own feelings. it allows us to outsource our emotional labor to strangers on the internet. it provides us instant, although no lasting, relief from the discomfort that comes with admitting to having supported something that you now realize was harmful or corrupt."
"but the game has become 'dont get cancelled', not 'be a good person' and it shows. we have struck the wrong chord of fear, and it is one that will unfortunately not last"
4 types of mistakes: stretch, a-ha moment, sloppy and high-stakes
"one driver of progressive amnesia is our desire to bypass our own feelings. it allows us to outsource our emotional labor to strangers on the internet. it provides us instant, although no lasting, relief from the discomfort that comes with admitting to having supported something that you now realize was harmful or corrupt."
"but the game has become 'dont get cancelled', not 'be a good person' and it shows. we have struck the wrong chord of fear, and it is one that will unfortunately not last"
4 types of mistakes: stretch, a-ha moment, sloppy and high-stakes
December 19, 2024
I picked this up in preparation for another upcoming holiday season where I'd be spending an excess amount of time with family and acquaintances who hold views I find harmful and painful. Contrary to the title, that isn't actually what this book is about. Nevertheless, I did enjoy what I found. This was a really quick and easy read. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially those who spend a lot of time online or have a lot of people in their life with social views that differ drastically from their own.
The author has a lot of interesting thoughts on cancel culture and the internet's tendency to apply a binary to people based on "with us or against us", "problematic or not" and how we take this complete disregard of nuance and apply it to people and relationships we have in real life outside of the internet. The book explores how nuance is difficult, but important; that someone can both hold a problematic view and still be someone you care about. You can't just apply if-else logic to human relationships.
I was pleasantly surprised at how much this book actually challenged me (especially since I came into it expecting validation). It made me question my reactions when I learn about someone being "cancelled" for harmful behaviour. Do I care about their growth or do I just want retribution? Do I celebrate punishment over consequence? Do I see the difference?
I also got a reminder that people shift and grow; that no one is born being right. I once made mistakes, and my loved ones will too. In that regard, this book's focus on empathy sort of did lead me to the answers I was seeking when I first picked it up.
The author has a lot of interesting thoughts on cancel culture and the internet's tendency to apply a binary to people based on "with us or against us", "problematic or not" and how we take this complete disregard of nuance and apply it to people and relationships we have in real life outside of the internet. The book explores how nuance is difficult, but important; that someone can both hold a problematic view and still be someone you care about. You can't just apply if-else logic to human relationships.
I was pleasantly surprised at how much this book actually challenged me (especially since I came into it expecting validation). It made me question my reactions when I learn about someone being "cancelled" for harmful behaviour. Do I care about their growth or do I just want retribution? Do I celebrate punishment over consequence? Do I see the difference?
"I have no problems with actions having consequences, and I love that more people with microphones are feeling more conscious of how they use them, but the game has become 'don't get cancelled,' not 'be a good person,' and it shows."
I also got a reminder that people shift and grow; that no one is born being right. I once made mistakes, and my loved ones will too. In that regard, this book's focus on empathy sort of did lead me to the answers I was seeking when I first picked it up.
November 21, 2024
I expected something different from what this book delivered. I thought it would be about relating to people that you care about, maybe people you work with that you have no choice but to communicate with, who believe things very different than what you do. There was little to none of that. Disappointed.
November 17, 2024
From the title and synopsis, I thought this would be a very different book than what it was, and not in a good way. I thought it would be focused more on navigating relationships with people who do things you disagree with and practical tips for that, and instead it barely mentioned that.
November 14, 2024
I heard about this on a podcast this morning and immediately had to download it because it felt like a lifeline being thrown my way in light of recent events. Like many people, I’m struggling with the divide in our country and especially the impact it’s having on my family. I struggled with the strain it put on my family the last time, but this time it’s feeling more like a personal attack than just politics. Brit Barron was able to provide overwhelmingly valuable insight and a new perspective, for which I am incredibly grateful. This is not just about struggling to stay connected to the ones you love who are hurting you with their opinions, but it also has you take a long hard look at your own opinions and where they come from and she asks you to challenge how your own Cognitive Closure limits you. She taught me about Progressive Amnesia and made me realize I, too, can be kind of a jerk in my own attempt to be the least jerk of the bunch. Thank you NPR for introducing me to this book and thank you Brit Barron for the therapy and life coaching.
February 5, 2025
3.75 stars rounded up. I listened to the audiobook edition.
I was really hoping this book would be about the title (isn’t this why we initially are drawn to books?), but I’d say less than half of it was truly about the decision to cut off (or not cut off) loved ones who don’t see eye to eye with us.
I ultimately liked the direction the author went in, but it was not completely what I assumed the book would be about. I wasn’t on board with every point she made, but two people can’t agree on everything, right? The author seems like a cool person and I enjoyed hearing what she had to say regarding cancel culture and our fear of being “wrong” getting in the way of true activism.
I was really hoping this book would be about the title (isn’t this why we initially are drawn to books?), but I’d say less than half of it was truly about the decision to cut off (or not cut off) loved ones who don’t see eye to eye with us.
I ultimately liked the direction the author went in, but it was not completely what I assumed the book would be about. I wasn’t on board with every point she made, but two people can’t agree on everything, right? The author seems like a cool person and I enjoyed hearing what she had to say regarding cancel culture and our fear of being “wrong” getting in the way of true activism.
April 15, 2025
This book provided an interesting perspective on cancel culture and creating genuine positive cultural change rather than fear-based or trend-based change. I appreciated the fact that she didn’t make it longer than it needed to be, something that often happens with these types of books.
June 26, 2025
** Did not read this book for any specific reason / person **just interested to hear what the author had to say - some good insights
August 17, 2025
Should’ve been titled differently.. but a good memoir and short book regarding “cancel culture” and embracing nuance.
August 15, 2025
Normalize making the title and subtitle of your book related to your book. :/ also the writing was giving Instagram caption or podcast transcript
November 9, 2025
This is undoubtedly one of the best books I've read this year. The last chapter includes a lot of overlap with the keynote that first put Brit Barron on my radar, but all of it is great. Barron has captured the challenging nuance of wanting to hold people accountable while still leaving room for growth and learning, and wanting to set boundaries while having clarity on when and where to draw the line. She vulnerably shares real stories of her own missteps throughout her life (I'm still feeling vicarious pain from the wedding video mistake) to illustrate the very human tendencies to either cover up or double down on mistakes. Her section on "progressive amnesia" is spot on; in many ways, this provided the personal conviction I expected and failed to get from We Have Never Been Woke. It's so true that when we learn we've caused harm, we don't want to spend the time sitting in that pain that's needed to offer compassion to the person who's two days or two years behind us on the journey. The sections on consequences vs. punishment and racial identity development were also excellent. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the audiobook because Barron, despite being a pastor, doesn't quite have the engaging audiobook narrator voice you might want, but if you can do text, the book's only around 160 pages so there's no excuse not to pick it up. I'd highly recommend this one.
January 22, 2025
This book forces you to consider another way besides cutting people out of your life for voting for Trump - a task I have accepted very easily. What’s much harder is embracing the nuance of difficult relationships and allowing this gap in beliefs to act as a space to kindly explain why you believe what you do, and what voting for Trump threatens for your life and identity.
I think a lot about my Dad voting for Trump and what feels like a denial of me in my identity as a woman, a priority he seems not to hold above the state of the economy. That pain comes out when we get into any conversation surrounding political issues (that shouldn’t be politicized, might I add) and I get overly emotional trying to advocate for myself and marginalized people around the world. Barron highlights the complexity of transforming your pain so you don’t transmit your pain, a recurring quote in my life as of recent. Transforming this pain is the only way I can get past my emotions in these conversations and lead with kindness and understanding while continuing to advocate for what I believe. THOSE conversations are, to me, 1000x more likely to be conducive to changed understandings and informed perspectives. Highly recommend this book — very very timely!
I think a lot about my Dad voting for Trump and what feels like a denial of me in my identity as a woman, a priority he seems not to hold above the state of the economy. That pain comes out when we get into any conversation surrounding political issues (that shouldn’t be politicized, might I add) and I get overly emotional trying to advocate for myself and marginalized people around the world. Barron highlights the complexity of transforming your pain so you don’t transmit your pain, a recurring quote in my life as of recent. Transforming this pain is the only way I can get past my emotions in these conversations and lead with kindness and understanding while continuing to advocate for what I believe. THOSE conversations are, to me, 1000x more likely to be conducive to changed understandings and informed perspectives. Highly recommend this book — very very timely!
November 26, 2024
I keep recommending this book to friends. I am grateful for Brit Baron’s honest look at online culture and the ways we fuel our own anxieties and polarizations. I ALSO can only recommend this book bc she never lets go of accountability for behavior in favor of “both sideism.” The word that comes to mind about this perspective is “sensible.” I think she can help us keep our feet on the ground and learn to live in the inevitable tensions in our relationships due to different perspectives and life experiences. This book is humble and vulnerable, while having something important to say. Read it, then call me and let’s chat!
February 8, 2025
This tiny, powerful book is packed with a lot of things to think about, including suggestions on how to process difficult situations with family and friends. This author explains that life is not one side or the other and that we are always changing. I was hoping the book would provide a magic way to get through this crazy world, but it's up to each of us to work through our hurdles and conflicts. But we also have the grace to make mistakes.
April 5, 2025
I had the pleasure of meeting Brit Barron last month, and I really liked what she had to say in her lecture. I wanted to read this book so I could have a better understanding of how to hold a relationship with family members who are problematic.
October 26, 2024
Lots of big ideas to think about. It's a helpful book.
February 2, 2025
- Easy, digestible read
- realistic in how it can be hard to navigate when to cut a loved one off
- not sure if I agree that you can offend someone without harm
- title felt misleading
- realistic in how it can be hard to navigate when to cut a loved one off
- not sure if I agree that you can offend someone without harm
- title felt misleading
October 19, 2025
Read with Ben. There are some good ideas here but it mostly felt like it was trying to meet a word count minimum
January 29, 2025
Could not have come at a more appropriate time 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
March 23, 2025
Do You Still Talk to Grandma? When the Problematic People in Our Lives Are the Ones We Love by Brit Barron (2024)
xxi+135-page Kindle Ebook story pages xi-129
Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Help, Family and Relationships
Featuring: Covid-19, Divorced Parents, Adult Child, Church, Disappointment, Religion - Christianity, Rachel Hollis, Homosexuality, Social Media, Anti-Racism, Moving Beyond Heroes and Villains, Internet Brain, Cognitive Closure, Forgetting Progressive Amnesia, Whatever You Do, Don’t Get Canceled, The Lost Art of Making Mistakes, Accountability, Not Annihilation, Boundaries to the Rescue, Charting a Way Forward, Footnotes, Author's Links
Rating as a movie: PG-13
Memorable Quotes: It was intense. Overwhelmingly, I was being pressured to make a public statement saying that what Rachel did was bad and, more specifically, that it was racist. “We need to know where you stand.” That’s what a lot of people were telling me, which was sort of funny. I thought, You want to know where I stand on what? On racism? I have literally spent a career creating conversations and content around understanding racism and developing an antiracist mindset. I have tons of content readily available on the Internet that would tell anyone who’s interested exactly where I stand on racism. What people were demanding of me felt like something else—it felt as if they were saying, “All of us are against this person now, and if you don’t join us, you are not radical enough.” I even had friends whom I hadn’t spoken to since college text me with questions like, “What do you think about your friend Rachel?” It was rude. And yet, what was I supposed to think of my friend Rachel? Now, in addition to the questions I’d already been working through because of my parents, about love and disappointment and change and expectations, I was being confronted by another pressing question: Do I have a responsibility to any of these strangers on the internet claiming to have all the right answers for me and demanding that I take action? Of course I felt profoundly disappointed to see Rachel say and write what she did, but I was also not naïve enough to believe that white people in America who started an antiracism journey in 2020 had become fully formed antiracists by 2021. There were two things that I felt confident in: I did not need to come to Rachel’s rescue, and I did not need to throw her under the bus. Living with the whole truth often means living with two contradictory truths at the same time—love and disappointment, friendship and letdown, needing neither to save nor to condemn.
I remember sitting around a table of friends when someone mentioned that their grandma voted for Trump, and after a loud gasp, someone else asked her, “Do you still talk to her?” She looked at that person with confusion, remained composed, and finally responded, “My nana? Yes, I still talk to her.”
And beyond practical skills, the church and my faith gave me a sense of comfort and security in the world. Believing that there is a God who is for me and loves me is an incredibly helpful framework—and yet that the same God was somehow obsessed with my virginity was weird. What was I to do with these competing realities? Could more than one thing be true at the same time? Could I stand against the patriarchy, white supremacy, and general nonsense of evangelicalism but also find wisdom and goodness in the Christian tradition? Can I grieve my time at an evangelical university that gave me equal parts trauma and financial debt while also deeply cherishing the friendships that I made there? I made it my mission to try to have both, to hold both, to keep my faith, and to fight against the abuse of power that caused me pain.
I was like, What? No, you’re the cool, progressive guy; you don’t get to say something good about the thing we all hate. I was confused and also maybe a little mad. Why do you get to acknowledge anything good?
Reality often comes in degrees, not binary poles. The world is not black and white, and neither are we. But that is complicated, that is hard, that is messy, and to be honest, that truth is not really as comforting. Perhaps the most enticing part of binary thinking is that it creates a world in which we could be right. We can eat, sleep, and breathe on the “right” side of the line, we can be continually and eternally good, we can have the right theology, the right ideology, the right parenting method, the right language, the right kind of activism, the right everything so that we will only ever land on the side of the hero and never the villain.
We have gotten into the dangerous habit of pressuring people to align with whatever “back of the book” answers their specific group holds. “Oh, you’re an evangelical? These are your answers. And you over there, you’re a liberal progressive? Here are your answers.” I have witnessed and also participated in this trend, sharing “answers’’ that I don’t understand or know anything about because I feared that not doing so would put me outside of the group I had found a home with. Back to our desire for external authorities: Maybe I don’t need to find my own equations or do my own work—I can just repost Glennon Doyle because she has the answers! But allowing a tweet from a stranger to serve as the “right answer” is not our best bet at true evolution, true growth, true human community. Our best answers are in the hard and nuanced work we do, and these answers are not one size fits all.
I am a queer Black woman in America, and I say all of this because it is a hard thing to be, and I hate this country for that.
I hate this country; I love this country. The two do not cancel each other out: They exist together, they dance with each other, and on different days one will dominate the other. My job is not to reconcile these two realities, or to force a contrived equality between them. All that I can do is allow them both to exist. The grief is there, the hope is there, and so are the anger and sadness, and the joy and pride. It is all there, all at once, and all I can do is hold all of it. And I want to keep all of it. I get to keep all of it. There is not one right way for me to think about America, nor is there one answer for how I should respond to what happens in America. The joy does not cancel out the pain; the grief does not cancel out the hope.
This man’s experience is a startling reminder of our need and desire for community and human connection. He was willing to ignore evidence and to adopt a set of beliefs if it meant he could be connected to other human beings. I guarantee you that he is not the first and that he won’t be the last person to sacrifice truth in order to belong.
Social media is a flat (and flattening) space that gives you basic information about where things are, but it cannot tell you anything about what they feel like, how they move and curve. The internet is two-dimensional, while real life is three-dimensional. But we have begun to interact with people as though they are two-dimensional. We tweet things like “If they don’t understand you, they don’t deserve you,” and we repost things like “If your mom isn’t in therapy, cut her off.” Comment sections are full of statements like “I am a random woman in Kentucky, and I’m here to hold you accountable.”
If you had asked me in 2004 who my heroes were, who I was inspired by, and who I wanted to be like, I would have said, without hesitation, Dave Chappelle and Kanye West.
A lot has changed since 2004. Those two men no longer stand at the top of my heroes list, and to be honest, I’ve been appalled by Ye’s antisemitic, anti-Black rhetoric and Chappelle’s anti-trans comedy. It is not just that I grew out of my fangirl stage; it was that I felt mortified that I was ever in it.
One day a friend at school asked me if I knew who they were, and I admitted I did not. I still remember the scolding laughter in his voice: “You don’t know who Blink-182 is?” After that, I asked around, got some information from my neighborhood friends, and at a grocery store found a People magazine with an article about Blink-182. I was with my mom, who wasn’t going to buy the magazine for me, so I quickly consumed as much information as I could before the groceries were bagged. Armed with literally the least amount of information possible, I was a little more prepared for the next time I might be questioned about this band. And the very next day I overheard someone talking about how much they loved Blink-182, and another girl asked, “Who is Blink-182?” There it was, my time to shine. Before I could even blink (pun intended), I shamed her with the same scolding laugh I was subjected to just the day before: “Oh my God, you don’t know who Blink-182 is?” I could see the embarrassment in her face, the same I had felt, but now here I was, standing on my high horse—a horse of three skimmed pages of a People magazine. Welcome to progressive amnesia.
I started seeing lots of white women on the internet going full WWE Smackdown in comments sections, calling out the racism of other white women when a very quick glance at their own profiles revealed that they had only joined this conversation two weeks earlier. And listen, I’m not saying you can’t call out racism, but when you have the equivalent amount of information that I had after a forty-five-second speed-read of a People magazine, maybe you can get off your high horse and invite people into the same conversation you just joined yesterday. Did these women on the internet not remember the three weeks prior when they didn’t even know racism was an issue? But now they were in the comment sections living out their full social justice warrior fantasy. Again, I am not saying that our connection to ourselves and to our mistakes takes us out of the work, but I hope that it can change our approach to the work. What would it have looked like if, instead of sending that girl who asked about Blink-182 into the same shame storm I had been through, I had said, “Oh girl, don’t trip. I just found out who they were yesterday—it’s a band.” Would that have been so hard? Would that have been any less “effective”? Why didn’t I just do that? Why didn’t more people on social media say things like “Hey, I actually just found out yesterday that the language I used for a long time is no longer appropriate. Let me know if you want the reading list that helped me get there”? One driver of progressive amnesia is our desire to bypass our own feelings. It allows us to outsource our emotional labor to strangers on the internet. It provides us instant, although not lasting, relief from the discomfort that comes with admitting to having supported something that you now realize was harmful or corrupt. Rather than sitting with the truth of your own history, it’s easier to project judgment onto the faceless people of the internet. James Baldwin puts it this way: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
I do not represent all Black people. I do not think all Black people need to or even should feel the same way as me, but when I look at my history and my experience and my current life, that is a way for me to engage in the work; it’s a path that makes sense for what I have and where I am. It would be outrageous for me to say, “This is the way I am doing it, so everyone needs to do it this way,” and it would also be unreasonable for me to say, “There’s someone who says this isn’t their way, so I should stop.” Our life experiences are not universal, so stop trying to make them so. You cannot boil everything down to a tweet, and your work will not look exactly like your neighbor’s. Maybe if we spent a little less time critiquing and more time moving, we could create some beautiful change in a world that so desperately needs it. My way is not the right way; it’s just right for me, and also, it may change, and that’s OK too. All I know is that I can’t and won’t do nothing. Everyone doesn’t have to agree with me, act like me, think like me, or move like me, but I do believe that other people and I are working toward the same goal, and it will take all of us doing what we can from where we are to get there.
My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½🌐🤔🫂
My thoughts: This was very thoughtful; there were a lot of political views, but I think that's the point of the story, navigating your beliefs and boundaries alongside others.
Recommend to others: Likely, this definitely isn't for everyone, but several good points should work for just about everyone no matter what side of the fence you're on.
xxi+135-page Kindle Ebook story pages xi-129
Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Help, Family and Relationships
Featuring: Covid-19, Divorced Parents, Adult Child, Church, Disappointment, Religion - Christianity, Rachel Hollis, Homosexuality, Social Media, Anti-Racism, Moving Beyond Heroes and Villains, Internet Brain, Cognitive Closure, Forgetting Progressive Amnesia, Whatever You Do, Don’t Get Canceled, The Lost Art of Making Mistakes, Accountability, Not Annihilation, Boundaries to the Rescue, Charting a Way Forward, Footnotes, Author's Links
Rating as a movie: PG-13
Memorable Quotes: It was intense. Overwhelmingly, I was being pressured to make a public statement saying that what Rachel did was bad and, more specifically, that it was racist. “We need to know where you stand.” That’s what a lot of people were telling me, which was sort of funny. I thought, You want to know where I stand on what? On racism? I have literally spent a career creating conversations and content around understanding racism and developing an antiracist mindset. I have tons of content readily available on the Internet that would tell anyone who’s interested exactly where I stand on racism. What people were demanding of me felt like something else—it felt as if they were saying, “All of us are against this person now, and if you don’t join us, you are not radical enough.” I even had friends whom I hadn’t spoken to since college text me with questions like, “What do you think about your friend Rachel?” It was rude. And yet, what was I supposed to think of my friend Rachel? Now, in addition to the questions I’d already been working through because of my parents, about love and disappointment and change and expectations, I was being confronted by another pressing question: Do I have a responsibility to any of these strangers on the internet claiming to have all the right answers for me and demanding that I take action? Of course I felt profoundly disappointed to see Rachel say and write what she did, but I was also not naïve enough to believe that white people in America who started an antiracism journey in 2020 had become fully formed antiracists by 2021. There were two things that I felt confident in: I did not need to come to Rachel’s rescue, and I did not need to throw her under the bus. Living with the whole truth often means living with two contradictory truths at the same time—love and disappointment, friendship and letdown, needing neither to save nor to condemn.
I remember sitting around a table of friends when someone mentioned that their grandma voted for Trump, and after a loud gasp, someone else asked her, “Do you still talk to her?” She looked at that person with confusion, remained composed, and finally responded, “My nana? Yes, I still talk to her.”
And beyond practical skills, the church and my faith gave me a sense of comfort and security in the world. Believing that there is a God who is for me and loves me is an incredibly helpful framework—and yet that the same God was somehow obsessed with my virginity was weird. What was I to do with these competing realities? Could more than one thing be true at the same time? Could I stand against the patriarchy, white supremacy, and general nonsense of evangelicalism but also find wisdom and goodness in the Christian tradition? Can I grieve my time at an evangelical university that gave me equal parts trauma and financial debt while also deeply cherishing the friendships that I made there? I made it my mission to try to have both, to hold both, to keep my faith, and to fight against the abuse of power that caused me pain.
I was like, What? No, you’re the cool, progressive guy; you don’t get to say something good about the thing we all hate. I was confused and also maybe a little mad. Why do you get to acknowledge anything good?
Reality often comes in degrees, not binary poles. The world is not black and white, and neither are we. But that is complicated, that is hard, that is messy, and to be honest, that truth is not really as comforting. Perhaps the most enticing part of binary thinking is that it creates a world in which we could be right. We can eat, sleep, and breathe on the “right” side of the line, we can be continually and eternally good, we can have the right theology, the right ideology, the right parenting method, the right language, the right kind of activism, the right everything so that we will only ever land on the side of the hero and never the villain.
We have gotten into the dangerous habit of pressuring people to align with whatever “back of the book” answers their specific group holds. “Oh, you’re an evangelical? These are your answers. And you over there, you’re a liberal progressive? Here are your answers.” I have witnessed and also participated in this trend, sharing “answers’’ that I don’t understand or know anything about because I feared that not doing so would put me outside of the group I had found a home with. Back to our desire for external authorities: Maybe I don’t need to find my own equations or do my own work—I can just repost Glennon Doyle because she has the answers! But allowing a tweet from a stranger to serve as the “right answer” is not our best bet at true evolution, true growth, true human community. Our best answers are in the hard and nuanced work we do, and these answers are not one size fits all.
I am a queer Black woman in America, and I say all of this because it is a hard thing to be, and I hate this country for that.
I hate this country; I love this country. The two do not cancel each other out: They exist together, they dance with each other, and on different days one will dominate the other. My job is not to reconcile these two realities, or to force a contrived equality between them. All that I can do is allow them both to exist. The grief is there, the hope is there, and so are the anger and sadness, and the joy and pride. It is all there, all at once, and all I can do is hold all of it. And I want to keep all of it. I get to keep all of it. There is not one right way for me to think about America, nor is there one answer for how I should respond to what happens in America. The joy does not cancel out the pain; the grief does not cancel out the hope.
This man’s experience is a startling reminder of our need and desire for community and human connection. He was willing to ignore evidence and to adopt a set of beliefs if it meant he could be connected to other human beings. I guarantee you that he is not the first and that he won’t be the last person to sacrifice truth in order to belong.
Social media is a flat (and flattening) space that gives you basic information about where things are, but it cannot tell you anything about what they feel like, how they move and curve. The internet is two-dimensional, while real life is three-dimensional. But we have begun to interact with people as though they are two-dimensional. We tweet things like “If they don’t understand you, they don’t deserve you,” and we repost things like “If your mom isn’t in therapy, cut her off.” Comment sections are full of statements like “I am a random woman in Kentucky, and I’m here to hold you accountable.”
If you had asked me in 2004 who my heroes were, who I was inspired by, and who I wanted to be like, I would have said, without hesitation, Dave Chappelle and Kanye West.
A lot has changed since 2004. Those two men no longer stand at the top of my heroes list, and to be honest, I’ve been appalled by Ye’s antisemitic, anti-Black rhetoric and Chappelle’s anti-trans comedy. It is not just that I grew out of my fangirl stage; it was that I felt mortified that I was ever in it.
One day a friend at school asked me if I knew who they were, and I admitted I did not. I still remember the scolding laughter in his voice: “You don’t know who Blink-182 is?” After that, I asked around, got some information from my neighborhood friends, and at a grocery store found a People magazine with an article about Blink-182. I was with my mom, who wasn’t going to buy the magazine for me, so I quickly consumed as much information as I could before the groceries were bagged. Armed with literally the least amount of information possible, I was a little more prepared for the next time I might be questioned about this band. And the very next day I overheard someone talking about how much they loved Blink-182, and another girl asked, “Who is Blink-182?” There it was, my time to shine. Before I could even blink (pun intended), I shamed her with the same scolding laugh I was subjected to just the day before: “Oh my God, you don’t know who Blink-182 is?” I could see the embarrassment in her face, the same I had felt, but now here I was, standing on my high horse—a horse of three skimmed pages of a People magazine. Welcome to progressive amnesia.
I started seeing lots of white women on the internet going full WWE Smackdown in comments sections, calling out the racism of other white women when a very quick glance at their own profiles revealed that they had only joined this conversation two weeks earlier. And listen, I’m not saying you can’t call out racism, but when you have the equivalent amount of information that I had after a forty-five-second speed-read of a People magazine, maybe you can get off your high horse and invite people into the same conversation you just joined yesterday. Did these women on the internet not remember the three weeks prior when they didn’t even know racism was an issue? But now they were in the comment sections living out their full social justice warrior fantasy. Again, I am not saying that our connection to ourselves and to our mistakes takes us out of the work, but I hope that it can change our approach to the work. What would it have looked like if, instead of sending that girl who asked about Blink-182 into the same shame storm I had been through, I had said, “Oh girl, don’t trip. I just found out who they were yesterday—it’s a band.” Would that have been so hard? Would that have been any less “effective”? Why didn’t I just do that? Why didn’t more people on social media say things like “Hey, I actually just found out yesterday that the language I used for a long time is no longer appropriate. Let me know if you want the reading list that helped me get there”? One driver of progressive amnesia is our desire to bypass our own feelings. It allows us to outsource our emotional labor to strangers on the internet. It provides us instant, although not lasting, relief from the discomfort that comes with admitting to having supported something that you now realize was harmful or corrupt. Rather than sitting with the truth of your own history, it’s easier to project judgment onto the faceless people of the internet. James Baldwin puts it this way: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
I do not represent all Black people. I do not think all Black people need to or even should feel the same way as me, but when I look at my history and my experience and my current life, that is a way for me to engage in the work; it’s a path that makes sense for what I have and where I am. It would be outrageous for me to say, “This is the way I am doing it, so everyone needs to do it this way,” and it would also be unreasonable for me to say, “There’s someone who says this isn’t their way, so I should stop.” Our life experiences are not universal, so stop trying to make them so. You cannot boil everything down to a tweet, and your work will not look exactly like your neighbor’s. Maybe if we spent a little less time critiquing and more time moving, we could create some beautiful change in a world that so desperately needs it. My way is not the right way; it’s just right for me, and also, it may change, and that’s OK too. All I know is that I can’t and won’t do nothing. Everyone doesn’t have to agree with me, act like me, think like me, or move like me, but I do believe that other people and I are working toward the same goal, and it will take all of us doing what we can from where we are to get there.
My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½🌐🤔🫂
My thoughts: This was very thoughtful; there were a lot of political views, but I think that's the point of the story, navigating your beliefs and boundaries alongside others.
Recommend to others: Likely, this definitely isn't for everyone, but several good points should work for just about everyone no matter what side of the fence you're on.
November 14, 2024
It was exactly the book I needed to be reading at the exact right time.
January 25, 2025
Incredibly insightful and one of those books that will keep you thinking even after setting it down. Can’t recommend it enough to my Christian friends out there who are still trying to figure life out, their relationships out, and how to navigate the world we live in!
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