Over the past two years, many politically split families have perfected the art of avoidance.

“It’s not worth it,” one woman said. “I don’t hide how I feel, but I don’t openly engage.”

The political divisions that separated Americans two years ago -- some hitting deep within their close, personal relationships -- are still open wounds. In some ways, they’ve gotten worse.

People have largely shed or stepped away from friendships that became strained after the election, but family is trickier. The holidays are a time when many feel obligated to get together with family members with whom they disagree, while trying to avoid confrontation at all costs.

A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that partisan identification has become the biggest wedge between Americans -- more so than race, gender, religion or level of education. A deep political difference reflects more than just a voting preference, the study found. In the minds of many, it reflects your character.

It’s sharpened the tension between who we love and what they believe. So, how best to navigate this?

James Croft, outreach director for the Ethical Society in St. Louis, offers a talk entitled “How and When to Be Civil” that tackles these thorny questions: What’s the difference between being civil and being nice? Is it ethical to uninvite people to Thanksgiving or family gatherings because they have offensive viewpoints? How is the traditional definition of civility used to quiet dissent?

Croft argues that if someone says something derogatory at the dinner table, it would be uncivil and unethical not to strongly challenge that point of view. His ideas might seem counterintuitive to the “be nice” and “avoid conflict” mindset of the Midwest.

“People don’t want to address challenging topics because some kind of tension will be introduced into the relationship, and they are nervous about that,” he said. But “civility is richer and more complex than just being nice.”

Don’t stay silent in the name of harmony.

If a person is unwilling to ignore uncivil views and comments from people they care about, then what is the most effective way to actually have a productive conversation about it?

“People only have their minds open if they feel valued and respected, and not when they are under threat,” he said. I asked him to address a specific scenario: Say a relative makes a racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted remark. What is an ethical way to respond?

You should first determine whether the person is reachable at all. Some people are unreachable -- they cannot be persuaded by any evidence or logic, and it’s best not to engage with them at all.

But others may be open to the possibility of making a connection.

Croft suggests saying something like: “Grandpa, I love you very much. You are extremely important to me. I don’t agree with what you just said. Would you be willing to hear why I don’t agree?”

It’s important to be able to listen, to hear people’s anxieties and their explanations of what they believe, he said. If you truly want to influence the way a person thinks about an issue, they have to feel heard. For example, consider a divisive and emotional issue like the migrant caravan in Mexico. Croft suggests starting with questions like, “Why do you think they’re coming here?” “What are you worried might happen?” “What have you seen to make you believe that?”

If the person says they fear crime, it can be helpful to agree that you also don’t want crimes to happen, and point out that many crimes are committed by Americans. So, why do they think immigrants would be more likely to commit a crime?

“It requires listening and staying with them, showing that you are on the same team -- not because you agree with them, but because you care about them,” he said. It can be helpful to cite sources who have more credibility with your family members because they share the same belief system, but have spoken out on a particular issue in a way that you can support.

He added that a person from a marginalized community does not have a responsibility to engage with someone saying something harmful. And, it’s also perfectly acceptable to skip the trip home if the experience would be traumatic, and your relatives are not capable of engaging with you in a respectful exchange.

His family found themselves facing a difficult decision recently after his father died. There is a strong difference of opinion between his mother and her sisters. His family decided the potential for tremendous stress was too great, and did not inform his mother’s sisters about the funeral.

“That’s OK,” he said. The true meaning of civility, Croft said, is making sure everyone in society has a place at the table and is treated with respect.

When my youngest sister confided in me three years ago that she was considering a run for public office, her babies were 1 and 2 years old. She was a sleep-deprived working mom whose husband also put in long hours as an attorney.

I encouraged her, because I know how much she has to offer the world, but in my heart, I worried about the toll such a campaign might take on her health and family. Rabeea is nearly a decade younger than me, and I have a maternal kind of protectiveness toward her. I also know how she gets when she puts her mind to a goal. She graduated a year early from our competitive high school in Houston. My parents said the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin would be too much for a 16-year-old graduate, but she went anyway. She worked her way through high school and college and won a merit scholarship to law school.

My sister doesn’t mess around when it comes to reaching the goals she sets for herself. So when she decided to run for district judge in Houston’s Harris County in 2016, we watched her pour her entire heart into the campaign. My parents and siblings stepped up to help with the kids, but really, it was my sister who found a way to spend every waking hour meeting with voters, fundraising, attending events, speaking to groups, continuing to work as a lawyer and still picking up her kids after school nearly every day. She expanded the definition of what constitutes “waking hours.”

I watched in awe.

Where did she get that energy, that drive?

I wanted that win for her more than anything I have ever wanted for myself. She forced a runoff in a heavily contested primary, but ultimately lost in the special election.

I couldn’t bear to think about all those countless hours and sacrifices she had made when the results came in that night. It’s pretty crushing when someone you believe in so strongly loses.

And that’s when my sister showed her mettle.

She decided to run again in 2018 -- this time, against a well-established incumbent.

My father called me soon after she told us, and asked me why she would put herself through such a grind again. Texas wasn’t ready to elect a judge who looked like her, he said, speaking from the experience of an immigrant who faced his own setbacks despite decades of hard work. I wondered if he was right. The political environment had only worsened since her first attempt.

We kept our doubts to ourselves. And if my sister had any, she didn’t indulge them. Instead, she got to work -- winning endorsements, talking to as many people in the third-largest county in the country as humanly possible. Then, a few months before the election, she was in a catastrophic car accident, which she miraculously survived with a few broken bones.

She resumed campaigning even when it hurt to take a full breath because her ribs were still healing.

I couldn’t sleep the night before the midterm elections. Rabeea sent our family a text that night, which said, in part: “Regardless of the result tomorrow night, I’ve won for having the best family a person could only dream of. There’s no way possible I could have gotten to this point without each of you.”

Her older son, now 5, asked her the morning of the election what would happen if she lost.

“It’s OK to lose, so long as you give your best, because we all have to lose sometimes,” she told him.

Her younger son, 4, piped up: “I know Momma’s gonna win.”

The day of the midterms, there was a knock at my door, and my son called out to me that someone had sent me a fruit bouquet. Turns out that my sister, facing the election of her career, to which she had devoted the past three years of her life, had remembered that my short film was premiering that night in St. Louis. She wrote that she was proud of the work I was doing.

Really, Rabeea?

When I walked out of the Tivoli theater that night, I saw a message in our family group chat that she had won. More than 630,000 people in Harris County voted for her -- electing her by a margin of over 100,000 votes.

“For me, this is the America that I know, love and will fight for until we get back on track,” she wrote to me.

I tried to think of a moment in my life when I had ever felt more proud, and I realized it had been two years ago, when Rabeea told me that she was going to run again.

I called my parents to congratulate them. They were in shock.

“I can’t believe it,” my father said. “I just can’t believe it.”

The country where he arrived nearly 50 years ago with little money and lots of dreams had just made his daughter a judge.

I was still reeling on Saturday from the breaking news of the massacre of Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Pittsburgh when I received an email jokingly comparing insects to humans.

It was a marketing email from Fix St. Louis, a local home-repair business. The subject line said: “The Undocumented Migrants Now Heading to YOUR House.”

I was stunned. Surely, a few hours after the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in America, no one was going to send jokes comparing migrants to pests that should be exterminated. Were they? Consider the email’s first three paragraphs:

“While you have been watching the TV drama play-out (sic), thousands of Hondurans and Guatemalans marching toward our borders, you may have been missing a different type of invasion that is literally happening all around you -- one that may impact you more directly.

“As someone who’s had the privilege of living the American Dream of homeownership, you may not realize that YOUR home IN PARTICULAR is the envy of literally thousands. And as the weather has gotten colder, these individuals have become MORE emboldened, and are ready to cross your borders, penetrate your walls, and move in with you without your permission.

“But there’s good news. In this case nobody will accuse you of being a racist, bigot or xenophobe if you refer to them as ‘pests,’ fortify your walls, or even call for their extermination! So let’s get to work.”

The rest of the email outlines how to deal with damage caused by woodpeckers, squirrels, carpenter bees, spiders, ladybugs, boxelder bugs and stink bugs. I clicked the “unsubscribe” button on the email, and when prompted to say why, I noted that it was racist.

I reached out to the company’s owner, Steve Boriss, to ask him about the content of the email. He wrote to me saying that he “sincerely did not understand what our newsletter had to do with race.”

“It requires imagination to suggest the newsletter makes any implications at all -- whether they are good people or whether they are doing a bad thing. It just isn’t in there,” he wrote. Regardless, he refused to talk to me because he said it appeared my mind was made up by the reason I gave for unsubscribing.

That’s unfortunate. I would have pointed out that the email directly calls the destructive pests he lists “undocumented migrants.”

It’s in the subject line.

“Undocumented migrants” is a term used to describe people: real humans fleeing their countries for desperate reasons. It is not a term that should be used to describe termites and rodents.

Plenty of research shows that using dehumanizing language to describe groups of people is harmful because it is easier to commit injustices and atrocities against those you’re convinced are not truly human -- more like stink bugs looking to invade. Dehumanizing words have long been used as weapons to convince otherwise “normal” people to go along with horrors and injustice.

Where else have we seen people compare groups of humans to animals? Just two weeks ago, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tweeted anti-Semitic remarks comparing Jews to termites. Farrakhan posted a clip to Twitter of a speech he gave, captioned, “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.”

When rhetoric like “infesting” is used by political leaders and Fox News hosts to describe people, they are invoking the same hateful language and imagery as Farrakhan -- and worse. It’s even more disgusting when outright lies -- such as claiming, without proof, that Middle Eastern terrorists are among the caravan, or that the migrants are infected with smallpox, a disease that has been eradicated -- are used to stir hatred and fear. The alleged shooter who killed 11 innocent worshippers was said to have been radicalized by right-wing pundits spreading conspiracies about Jewish leaders helping refugees.

Earlier this week, the Huffington Post reported that Patrick Stein, one of three right-wing militiamen found guilty in April of a conspiracy to kill Muslim refugees living in rural Kansas, offered an interesting defense. Stein’s attorneys said their client got caught up in the anti-Muslim information he was devouring online and from conservative talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Stein referred to Muslims as “cockroaches” he wanted exterminated, according to the report.

Dehumanization starts with language.

We try to teach our children that words matter. They should not be used to degrade other people. That point is more challenging to explain when kids see and hear dehumanizing language from supposedly mature adults -- from the president to TV pundits to a local business owner.

The most discouraging part of the marketing email I received is not that Boriss refused to have a conversation about why it might be wrong to make the sort of comparisons he did.

It’s that this kind of dehumanizing language has become so normal and mainstream for a segment of Americans that they cannot even begin to see a problem with it.