Donald Trump has torn my family apart

May 16, 2016 - 12:00AM
Aubrey Perry

Greaseball. Wetback. Spic. Beaner. I grew up with these words in the house. Not because that's what people called us. That's what we called Mexicans.

At least, my parents did. We were white. We lived in Turlock, California. A blue-collar place with a lot of immigrant labour. My dad ran a one-man pest extermination business, and my mum taught ESL (English as a Second Language) and basic English at a local college. Today, both of my parents are vehement Donald Trump supporters ...

I don't use Twitter much. But, wow. My mum does. I recently checked her Twitter page for the first time in a while and was shocked. Hateful memes, ugly language, and appearance-based attacks, targeted at Hillary Clinton, stacked up. And not just hateful, but off-topic and malicious calling Hillary "ugly", "old" and "screechy". An "unlikeable old bag. The 'woman card' stinks!" my mother wrote. My mother! A college instructor! She should know better. She's no internet troll. Is she?

And then I remembered. I remembered the vocabulary my parents used when I was a child. The racial slurs and put-downs thrown around the dinner table, the contempt that was always there, the disdain, the racism, the aggression ...

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/donald-trump-has-torn-my-family-apart-20160512-gotjq2.html