Give me the strength ww

Trigger warnings: Racism and politics - turn back while you're ahead or buckle up.


I'm 14 days from my wedding, and just trying to maintain my sanity with my family - specifically my dad and his wife. Pops has known my partner for quite a long time (8+ years) and they get along fine enough. In the early days Pops was fairly explicitly racist (not n word level but like "does he know his dad" level), which led me to skip out on holidays and gatherings for a few years.My flipping partner convinced me to reach out the olive branch since it was making it hard on my brother to negotiate holidays with my niece and nephew. Fine, we're civil enough and we just leave it to surface level.Fast forward to proposal, and at first I was adamant we aren't taking any of that man's $ for this. Then he gave me this spiel that I'm his only daughter and I'm taking something from him. He writes a fat check and said use for a down payment or a wedding, didn't matter to him. We accepted and have tried to include him/ consult before major things as a courtesy - invited a list of his friends, yadda yadda.But a few months ago I asked him if he considered that my partner would be part of his family after we're married (not even that he's been around for 10 yrs already). I wanted us to do a part of the ceremony where his family accepts me and Pops accepts Lamont. I asked him to consider how a lot of his rhetoric (at the dinner table and FB) may indicate he doesn't understand what it would mean to love and support a black son. He said he likes Lamont and he's "one of the good ones" (siiiiigh with his old racist crap) - I told him maybe zoom out and think on that some more and how that may be hurtful to us. He has only gotten worse up to now. I told him I scrapped the acceptance piece of the ceremony - I wasn't looking for lip service.
Someone out there convince me that I shouldn't cut all of Pop's participation - I'm ready to be like I'll walk myself and cancel dancing with him. He can sit, but put on your mask so I can just ignore him. I am so sorry that others are probably going through even worse versions of this. Luckily my brother got an education and tried to use it, so we're both not as dumb as the tree we feel from.