3 Steps for Handling Hate Speech Without Losing the People You Love
What Easter dinner taught me about silence, complicity, and speaking up.
Every Easter, the family gathers to celebrate the resurrection. It’s the story of a man who was killed, in part, because not enough people spoke up.
This year, somewhere between the ham and the dessert, someone at the table said something casually racist.
Forks kept moving. Someone changed the subject. I looked the other way.
A few months earlier, someone at the table with strong Christian beliefs had posted something derogatory about the LGBT community on social media. I didn’t see it. But I heard about it. And ignored it. I told myself what I always tell myself: We can’t change people. I don’t want to turn Easter dinner into a political battlefield.
For a long time, I thought keeping the peace was a form of love. It’s what we’re taught, after all. Be patient, be gentle, keep the family together.
But I’ve come to believe that’s a corruption of what Christianity actually asks of us. Jesus didn’t keep the peace. He flipped tables. He ate with the people his society had cast out. He said plainly that whatever you do to “the least of these,” you do to him.
Silence isn’t kindness. It’s the soil in which hatred grows. And I don’t think you can call yourself a follower of Christ while looking the other way when someone at your Easter table is diminished.
How Silence Built the Machinery of Evil
We all know how Nazi Germany ended. What we forget is how it began. Not with gas chambers, but with small, unchallenged moments of compliance.
Most Germans in the early 1930s were not fanatics. They were tired, economically desperate, and deeply uncomfortable with the rising rhetoric. Many privately disliked the antisemitism but told themselves it was “just talk.” When Jewish shop windows were smashed, neighbors looked away. When Jewish professors were fired, colleagues stayed quiet to protect their own careers. When the Nuremberg Laws stripped rights one by one, most people told themselves: It’s not my fight. I don’t want to make things political.
By the time the trains rolled toward Auschwitz, the machinery of evil was already oiled by years of polite silence.
Martin Niemöller wrote the poem we all half-remember:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Compliance doesn’t require malice. It only requires that good people value harmony more than truth.
The Pattern at My Own Table
I see that same pattern now when I look at my own behavior.
I’m not naive enough to think I’ll change people’s beliefs. But when I let comments pass without a word, I am sending a message to everyone else at that table that racism is acceptable.
Social media posts wound real human beings. When I ignore them, I signal to everyone watching that these words fall within the bounds of family values. I become a participant in the normalization of harm.
I used to comfort myself with the fact that it’s just words. But words are the seed. Left unchallenged, they grow into policies, into votes, into cultures where certain people are treated as less than human.
Anything that strips another person of dignity should not be tolerated. Not in the name of family peace, not in the name of free speech, not even out of respect for elders. Tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance. It’s surrender.
How to Speak Up With Consciousness
The cycle is vicious: unloving words provoke defensive responses, defensiveness hardens into more hatred, and silence lets it all spin faster.
Breaking the cycle doesn’t mean turning every holiday into a debate tournament. It means refusing to let hate hide behind “keeping the peace.”
The most useful tool I’ve found comes from Jane Downing’s book Finding Your Voice: Reclaiming Personal Power Through Communication. She calls it pacing and leading, and it’s worth understanding what it actually is because it can sound like manipulation. It isn’t. It’s a win-win, collaborative approach to difficult conversations that seeks a satisfactory outcome for both people, not just a victory for one.
The idea is simple: the way to influence someone to hear your point of view is to genuinely join them where they are first, and then invite them to follow you where you’d like to go. Pacing is what happens when two people in opposition are brought closer together because one is willing to seek real understanding before asking to be understood in return.
It works in three Steps.
Pace. Get genuinely curious. Drop the story that the other person is evil or stupid. Ask yourself what they actually believe and why. Not to trap them. But to actually understand. Reach for questions that open things up rather than shut them down:
“What makes you feel that way?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Tell me more.”
“How so?”
Most people have never been asked to explain their position with genuine interest. When they are, they often hear their own words differently.
Pace. Paraphrase what you heard. Before you say a word about your own view, reflect theirs back. This is the step most people skip. And it’s the most disarming one.
“It seems like you feel….”
“Sounds like you believe…”
“I sense that for you, this is really about…”
This isn’t an agreement. It’s an acknowledgment. And it earns you the right to be heard in return.
Lead. Assert your own view. Now, calmly and without condemnation, you speak. Use “I” statements that express your perspective rather than attack theirs:
“I find that hard to accept, because…”
“I believe that every person deserves dignity, regardless of…”
“My experience has been very different…”
“I don’t believe anything inherently unloving can be right.”
No lecture. No name-calling. Just your truth, stated clearly, after you’ve done the work of actually listening.
Then stop. You don’t have to “win”. You’ve planted a seed. You’ve raised consciousness. You’ve shown anyone watching that love has limits and that holding them doesn’t have to look like a fight.
From now on, the casual racism stops getting an automatic pass. The hurtful posts will no longer go unnoticed. And people can see how you can hold a line without losing your composure.
The Only Question Left
None of us is pure. I’ve said things I cringe at now. We are all works in progress.
But progress requires us to stop pretending that silence is neutral.
If something is unloving, like racism at the dinner table, cruelty disguised as religion, any form of dehumanization, it is our responsibility to say so. Not to shame. Not to cancel. To raise consciousness. Because the alternative is watching the same slow creep that happened in 1930s Germany, only this time across our own dinner tables and social media feeds.
The cost of speaking up is temporary discomfort. The cost of staying silent is moral complicity.
I’m choosing discomfort. What about you?
If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Have you stayed silent when you wish you’d spoken? Have you found a way to push back that actually worked? Let’s learn from each other.
Love isn’t always soft. Sometimes it looks like courage at the dinner table.