This Woman Lost Her Parents To Donald Trump (WITH VIDEO)

Aubrey Perry (image from Perry's Facebook)
Aubrey Perry (image from Perry’s Facebook)

In recent years, it’s become almost inevitable for us to get into spats with our families over politics. But few of those disputes end the way it did for one American artist. She has been forced to cut ties with her parents after discovering that her mother has turned into a full-on troll for Donald Trump.

Aubrey Perry has spent the last seven years in Melbourne. She kept in touch with her parents in California mostly via social media. But in an op-ed for The (Melbourne) Age, Perry revealed that ended earlier this spring, when she made a rare visit to the Twitter page of her mother, Barbara Jensen. She expected to see a lot of pro-Trump tweets–after all, her father has been a staunch Trump supporter, while her mother gave strong hints she was open to supporting Trump.

But nothing prepared Perry for the avalanche of “hateful memes, ugly language, and appearance-based attacks” against Hillary Clinton she found on her mother’s Twitter feed. Among other things, Jensen called Hillary “ugly,” “screechy” and “an unlikable old bag.” Perry could not bring herself to understand how her mother–a longtime ESL teacher at a local college–could be so blindly loyal to a man who didn’t know whether he should denounce out-and-out racists who were endorsing him.

Specifically, a KKK Imperial Grand Wizard who told WWBT in Richmond that he and his followers had a lot of common ground with Trump. In case you missed it, watch here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12QglUuwYNc

When she asked her mother if she’d really written those tweets and shared those memes, her mother replied, “You don’t share my beliefs, and you don’t have to.” However, for Perry, this is way beyond a mere difference of opinion. She is married to a black man, and they have a daughter together. Needless to say, her parents’ support for someone who even needs to question whether to denounce racist knuckledraggers is “completely intolerable in our home and, ultimately, in our world.”

For that reason, she did something she felt that she should have done years earlier when her parents threw around racial slurs about her mother’s students (such as “wetback” and “beaner”) at the dinner table in Turlock, California–she called her mother out publicly. She replied that she was “disappointed and embarrassed” that “a supposed critical thinker” could be so fanatically devoted to Trump–especially considering that she has a black son-in-law and a mixed-race granddaughter.

The final straw came more or less by accident. She was digging for more information on William Johnson, a white supremacist who was tapped as a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention–supposedly due to a glitch in the database. To Perry’s shock, her mother was listed as a pledged Trump delegate from the 10th congressional district, her parents’ home district.

Perry couldn’t hold it in anymore. She posted a number of screenshots of her mother’s vicious tweets, as well as a video of her mother declaring herself “all Trump, only Trump, always Trump, forever Trump” at the California Republican Convention. Her mother has since cut off all contact with her and blocked her on social media. Perry thinks it’s just as well. She has decided that for as long has her parents promote “these ideologies of hate and xenophobia,” she cannot in good conscience have any contact with them. She regrets not speaking up sooner, but now realizes that ignoring this kind of bilge in our families amounts to “accepting it within our culture.”

As a black man who currently has a white girlfriend and has dated mostly white women, I see where Perry is coming from. Supporting Trump is one thing. But it’s quite another to be, in Perry’s words, “actively promoting his dangerous ideologies” knowing you have minorities as relatives. By the same token, I have enough respect for my more conservative friends not to share every pro-Hillary meme under the sun–even though most of them know I wear my politics like a frat letter.

Sadly, what happened to Perry and her family is a reflection of the lack of civility in this country. Hopefully it’s not too much to ask for all of us, regardless of shade, to have enough respect for family members who don’t think like this to back off the accelerator a bit.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.