The White People’s Problem

Empathy works through identifying with others’ pain, or with other strong emotions. If you are not a psychopath, you can empathize with someone being ill, losing a parent, or learning of a bad diagnosis. It is not just pain, but also such things as love for own children, romantic love, or joy. You draw on a bank of your own experiences, and find a similar one, remember how it felt, relive it to an extent, and therefore can be helpful to the person you empathize with. Just communicating your empathy is very helpful. Building long-term healthy relationships is impossible without empathy. It works very well on universal or nearly universal human experiences that have to do with our bodies, family relations, love, and a few other things we have in common.

However, the mechanism breaks down when others experience pains we never experiences. For example, I never felt an intense gaze of a security guard, and never second-guessed myself, if the gaze is real or is it my paranoia. My heart does not beat faster when I am pulled over by a cop. I never had to, because I am not Black. I can learn about this experience from others, or from the literature, or movies, but my own personal experiential bank does not have that experience. I have never been mistaken for a student and spoken to condescendingly, not  even when I was a much younger professor. It is because I am not a woman in academia. I heard that story many times, so I get a rough idea, but there is not an emotion easy to recall to match that experience. I was never pushed by an angry person behind me in line, who thought I am ignoring him. This is because I am not Deaf and don’t need to see people to know they are trying to talk.

This failure of empathy is not symmetrical. Of course, there is some unique experiences I had that people from marginalized groups did not have. However, precisely because I don’t have to worry about what my race, gender, ability are, my own pains belong to the class of more universal, and therefore more commonly understood ones. People from marginalized groups are much likely to empathize with me than I with them. This is because they are likely to have the emotional bank of the common human experiences in addition to their unique bank of specific pains. It is like they know my language, but I don’t know half of theirs.

Sometimes is it perceived as pretending not to understand. It is not actually easy to imagine the other person who had never experienced your particular kinds of pain and lack emotional vocabulary to express the empathy. It is totally understandable, and may be true for some people. But in many cases, we simply have a hard time to actually see and perceive the slights and offenses you experience. We know they exist. Theoretically we want to empathize, but it just takes much linger to process these kinds of recognition.

I remember attending a reception after a meeting in Paris, where I was chatting with a Dutch guy. It was just after the Russian missile shot down the Malaysian Boeing with hundreds of Dutch people on it. I happened to represent the Russian government at the meeting (don’t ask, the Russian government sends academics to meetings, because almost no one in the government speaks English). So we were chatting and joking. The Dutch guy looked at me somewhat intensely, and only on the next day I realized why. I knew the story, of course, but it was not the same knowledge as his was. Mine was theoretical, his was visceral. Seeing him did not trigger an emotional alert, so I forgot to say the right words. I still feel guilty about my silence. These kinds of misrecognitions are a result of our different lived experiences. What took him a split second, took me a whole day to realize.

The mismatch of experiences between White, able-bodied, straight men and others is both tragic and mitigatable. There is still a way to train our imagination and learn to experience what others experience without actually directly living it. It takes a specific kind of imagination, and significant willingness to try. We may never get very good at reading other people’s pain, but we can definitely get better at it.