Race and Empathy

After the inauguration of Donald Trump, many people had various ideas regarding how we could fix the political divide within the United States. I read ideas from talking to neighbors and people at coffee shops (read: do nothing different from your everyday life) to shopping at minority-owned businesses, to stepping out of your comfort zone to intentional interact with minorities in their own spaces. Obviously the focus on race came from the racially-charged pandering that was ubiquitous in Trump's campaign and iminent presidency, and I think it is part and partial to the political divide in the United States. While there are issues related to traditional Republican and Democratic politics such as union politics and religious politics, etc., politics of race and culture have been important specifically related to issues around Black Lives Matter, DACA, education, and HUD. For that reason, many responses to fixing the racial divide within this nation arose from the election of Trump including Safety Pin Box, the NFL protests, and the push for reinvestment in Black-owned businesses. All of these are vitally important for the reason that our communities continue to be hyper-segregated. More importantly, when White people -- and I say White people because of the privilege of their mobility -- choose to segregate themselves from communities of color, they lose what is an integral part of human interaction: empathy.

Most White folks lack empathy for people of color. They lack the ability to attempt empathy. This stems from segregation, which impedes the ability for White people to discern racial features and defining characteristics.

I'll start with a personal story. When I began teaching in minority-majority schools, I had difficulty telling students of color apar from one another. While it is easy for White people to show their fragility when they are confronted with the line, "we all don't look the same," it is important to recognize the inherent truth within that plea. The truth is that, to many White people, people of color do look the same, and they must acknowledge that 1) that is a problem and 2) problems must be fixed.

There have been a few studies that articulate the difficulty people have discerning physical characteristics between individuals who identify with a race that is not their own. One study explains that "the information people focus on when looking at a face of another racial group is information that is optimal for group classification (that's a Black man") rather than individual recognition ("that's a man with a mustache and a down-turned mouth")."

Because a large part of empathy comes from the ability to mimic the reactions of others, it becomes problematic when defining characteristics for people of color are limited to race. Because of increased segregation, White people perpetuate a society that lacks empathy for people of color. In other words, a society that perpetuates segregation also perpetuates the inability for White people to see people of color as individual human beings. This aligns with a number of different studies that became popular after the murder of Trayvon Martin. Scientists had found that White people believed that Black people did not feel as much pain as they did. This, by definition, represents a lack of empathy.

I believe, however, that we can find a silver lining, though. As I continued engaging with more people of color both through my work, and through my personal life, I found that I began to care about them. I saw what made them different both physically and socially. While it can be hard to be honest about this, it is important for me to show my progression as someone who grew up in a segregated community. Through being immersed in a community that was not a reflection of myself, I began to create empathy. I began to care about the people around me -- people who did not look like me.

Those who say that a way to fix our divided socio-political nation is to actually interact with people who don't look like us, invest in their businesses, attend their churches, go to their barber shops, they aren't wrong. They see the lack of empathy that White people have for communities of color, and it is incumbent upon White people to address that lack of empathy. What is most important to understand is that racial segregation is an imposition that stems from White privilege and superiority, and it is on the White community to understand their flaws and ameliorate those flaws. It is on the shoulders of White folks to change the systems they created in order to build a more perfect union that incorporates all voices. It takes cultural agility, and a part of that agility is empathy. If we remain segregated, that lack of empathy will persist, and we will fail as a nation.