Last year, as the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal same-sex marriage, I celebrated the fact that so many more people from the LGBTQ community could now have their love recognized by the nation. My parents, however, weren't so pleased. They immediately turned to the fact that even though same-sex couples could now get married, they shouldn't have kids. Unfortunately, in their eyes, there isn't much of a point for marriage if you don't have kids.
This brought on an hour of discussion and, later on, I realized that their views are like this because they were brought up this way. They were both raised in conservative South Asian families. Save for the fact that both their parents accepted that women deserve education, their opinions were pretty racist and sexist. So, when they became parents, they taught me and my brother some very troublesome things that are hard to unlearn.
Yes, my parents want me to get a higher education. However, they still expect women to cook, clean, and raise the kids. Being from an Indian family, I was subconsciously raised to hate other cultures/religions. It was only once I was in high school that I realized that I was inadvertently kind of racist and had internalized some very sexist thoughts. However, I don't blame my parents because they were just trying to teach us what they think is right.
We are the generation that could change the world. We are the revolution. We demand equal pay for equal work, we recognize the systematic racism that is so entrenched in our country, and we strive for equality across race, class, gender, and sexual orientation (among others). However, maybe it is time to turn to the people who we love and educate them. Maybe it is time to turn to your mother and say, "No, you're wrong."
The biggest service that we can do for society, our world, is to turn to our parents and tell them that they're wrong. That may be a lot. While we preach about peace to our own generation, we often ignore the previous generation, where even in the most open-minded homes there are social evils. Our parents' generation is the generation that is the biggest propagator of rape culture, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, caste-ism, and Islamophobia, to name a few.
So, stop trying to make a difference online and in front of the screen. Instead, turn to the family behind it and tell them that they're wrong. Don't ignore them because you think that you're disrespecting them. You are disrespecting them by letting them become socially outdated.
