Disowning your parents is an incredibly painful thing to do. These are the people who created you. The people who raised you and loved you and kissed your  boo-boos  when you got hurt. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary as Aubrey Perry, an Australian-based artist and author, recently discovered. In an article written for The Sydney Morning Herald, the young woman explained why she had to cut her parents out of her life and the life of her child.Perry was perusing a list of California Trump delegates when she discovered a horrifying name on the list: her mother s. I found her name when I was scanning the list to see if the white supremacist William Daniel Johnson had been removed (since he d said he would not be attending): there she was, #10 on the list. She said her parents have always been racist. Her mother, an ESL (English Second Language) teacher and basic English teacher at the college level, often referred to her students with contempt when Perry was growing up. She said: 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. Perry explains that she knew her parents believed ignorant garbage, but because she lives in Australia and only speaks to her parents online, through text and on the phone it was easy to ignore   they never spoke about politics. However, after Perry saw her mom s name on the delegate list she started investigating and what she found is what ultimately led to her decision to severe ties: And 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? She was; her mom was a Trump troll and filled all of her social media accounts with racist, sexist, xenophobic memes and posts. She found videos of her mom being interviewed by Fox News at a California rally. Perry said the video shows her mom saying, He sounds like us, he talks like us   I m all Trump, only Trump, always Trump, forever Trump!  The video reminded her of the Imperial Wizard of the KKK saying that the Klan supports Trump because  what he believes in, we believe in. Perry isn t just an ordinary liberal who is disgusted with Donald Trump just because she is a progressive and he is a conservative; his beliefs hurt her family.  My husband is black. We have a daughter together. My parents  support of a candidate who could not decide if he should accept the endorsement of the KKK is completely intolerable in our home and, ultimately, in our world. She finally confronted her mother, and her mom brushed her off. So, she decided to take screenshots of her mom s hate speech, saved the video clips of her interview on Fox News and posted everything on Facebook, slamming her parents for their ignorance. On Twitter she said, Your Twitter feed makes me disappointed and embarrassed of you as a person, a supposed critical thinker, and my mother. Shocked.  Her mom responded by blocking her on social media. Her dad found out and sent her a threatening email, saying: I know you have never said anything you might not like to be made public,  he wrote,  so if you want to continue this attack mode, please remember all things have consequences. Perry said her parents  response to her criticism hurt her but she wasn t surprised. More importantly, though, she said it was time to speak up and let them know that their hate and ignorance was not acceptable. Her entire life she had kept her mouth shut and let their rhetoric roll off her back and that, she explains, is her biggest regret: By ignoring racism, xenophobia, and misogyny within our families, we are accepting it within our culture. To ignore is to accept. As my daughter plays on the floor in front of me while I type this, I think about her ancestry. I think about the suffering that has been endured so that she can live in a free and just world, and I feel a responsibility to the continuity of that humanity. If I don t oppose my parents  behaviour and objectives, if I don t reject Trump and all that he stands for, if I don t change my family s vocabulary so that my daughter never knows the hateful words I heard growing up, I m undoing the progress that generations before me have fought and died for. And that, I won t accept. She s exactly right. As a white woman with a mixed race child and a husband who is from Central America, I know where she is coming from. For a very long time I ignored the hate coming, not from my parents, but from other people who I was close to. People I d grown up with, gone to school with. It was easier to pretend they were not that stupid than to confront them and get into an argument. Like Perry, I came to the realization that by not telling these people how I felt, how their hate affected my son, my husband, our friendship, I was doing a disservice. I started speaking out, I m not friends with some of those people anymore and that s okay, they are not nice people anyway.The point is that by not speaking out, we lead these people to believe that what they are saying is acceptable and it isn t. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains why it is important to use our voices to stop this kind of divisiveness, better than I ever could, while speaking to a group of college graduates in 2011: Do not stand idly by if you witness injustice. You must intervene. You must interfere. You are now going into a world which is hounded, obsessed with so much violence, often so much despair. When you enter this world and you say the world is not good today, good! Correct it! Featured image via Facebook