Empathy Flowing in Many Directions

A friend shared a New York Times opinion piece by Kaitlyn Greenidge yesterday that really planted a seed in my brain. First of all, read the piece. Especially if you are a white woman, as am I. It is a tangible, down to earth example to help us understand white privilege. And that is work I am/need to be doing continually. It is an ever changing path; a rocky shoreline.

So when we as black girls read most books, we have to will ourselves into the bodies on the page, with a selectivity and an internal edit that white readers of the same canon do not necessarily have to exercise.

“So what?” one might think. Isn’t reading fiction an exercise in empathy?

But empathy for whom, and for what higher purpose, always complicates this supposedly benevolent action. Is empathy really empathy if it’s generally asked to flow in only one direction? Under those circumstances, empathy looks less like identifying with the other and more like emotional hegemony. – by Kaitlyn Greenidge, NYTimes, 1/13/2020.

The quote I pulled above was useful for me today both professionally and personally. As a group process geek in my work, I’ve always sought to cultivate empathy in any group. Ms. Greenidge helped me see that empathy might also be oppression. Is it right to claim empathy with another when we clearly don’t understand, see or acknowledge their world view and experience?

Though it’s examination of the Greta Gerwig movie version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” as viewed by women of color, Ms. Greenidge helps me raise some new questions for myself when working with people coming from different contexts.

When designing and facilitating group process, how are we discovering and staying conscious of our filters that may, if left unchecked, render even empathy as a deficit because it is “emotional hegemony?” Here are three starting points for me today.

  1. What values, myths or traditions of my own am I consciously or unconsciously calling on to frame group process?
  2. How am I broadening the range of values, myths and traditions I include to reflect the seen and potentially unseen contexts of people in the group?
  3. How does my language reflect my unconscious frames (and thus biases) and who can I call upon to help me by listening to my patterns and challenge them. Ideally, not asking a person of color to do this. This is not their job!

What recommendations do you have so that when we utilize our empathy, we are not inadvertently rendering it as a weapon? How do we find our path?

13 thoughts on “Empathy Flowing in Many Directions”

  2. Thanks so much for this, Nancy. I had read Greenidge’s article when it appeared, and reflected on it for awhile before moving on. As both a facilitator of group conversations and a creator/trainer of a workshop on Unconscious Bias, I deeply appreciate your sharing of your three starting points, which I will adopt as well. I must admit, I haven’t thought nearly enough about how my view of the world shapes how I plan, design, frame and facilitate conversations or learning activities, but thanks to you, I will now. I also- may make this a topic of a future Communique, my monthly newsletter. If so, I will certainly quote you…unless you want to co-write it with me! Thanks again for your reflection and insights.

  3. Thank you for sharing this, Nancy. The article would fit nicely in a discussion I witnessed in a homeschooling group where a mother asking about books with black heroes got a few “white-privileged” questions on why it matters so much.

    It also makes me think about the nuances of interacting with indigenous people and their cultures that we have touched upon in the summer. All those things are about recognising worldviews and assumptions that are so ingrained that they require special attention to be noticed and taken into account.

  4. What an interesting post! The opinion piece was fascinating to me as an avid reader — I’ve been really interested in African-American and Latino literature since I was a kid (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was actually one of my favorite books) and I’ve never really deeply questioned how my bias and empathy might be coming into play as I read these books. Your questions are so timely for me, too — I’ve just started volunteering as a book buddy at an urban elementary school and these questions are really good ones to keep in mind as I interact with the kids and choose which books to read to them. THANK YOU.

  5. Pingback: The Dangers of Unexamined Empathy | Full Circle Associates

      1. Thanks, I did both on KM4Dev-l and on LinkedIn.
        As I indicated there a discussion about white privilege (wp’s) can only become really interesting if whiteprivilegeless (wpl’s) people join in and if among the whiteprivilege people we also find wp’s that lived as a minority among wpl’s. As you may know I did live in Senegal for 2 years, in Solomon Islands for 2 years, in deep rural Guinea (Conakry) for 3 years and, for 4 years in rural Zambia.
        The challenge is to get them into the conversation.

  7. Hi Nancy, thanks for pushing my thinking on this. I’m in the middle of reading a book that I really recommend in this context: https://debbyirving.com/the-book/
    “Waking up white: and finding myself in the story of race” Debby Irving makes the point that to understand race in America white people have to understand their white perspective first. An interesting observation in this very personal book about waking up: She talks about how she used to think she had no race, that race was only for brown people and that she was just, well, a normal person…

    1. Hi Eva, I was fortunate enough to hear Debby speak in our community (NW suburb of Boston) a couple of years ago, and honestly, it changed my life. It was huge wake-up call for me, who had never really considered myself especially “privileged” to any great extent. From that moment on, I have been active in our Fostering Racial Justice community and have gone on to lead Discovering Unconscious Bias workshops for those may imagine they are untouched by bias. I highly recommend her book, and if you ever get a chance to hear her speak and ask questions, grab it. Thanks for posting this.

  8. First, an interesting, related link: https://www.fastcompany.com/90462892/filter-out-male-privilege-and-the-web-can-be-a-ghost-townf

    @Peter – one thing that I think is a bit unique here is the US perspective and our range of collective blindness to the fact that our country was built on the backs of slaves. This is a particular kind of racism and I don’t know how well it generalizes to the international development community, nor to folks who have gone from being the majority in their home countries to being a minority as an expat. Privilege, as I understand it, comes in many forms and the WP I am trying to understand in the US has deep context IN the US. I don’t want to generalize, but I’d be very interested in the intersections!

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