(“Since I can no longer post under frican American News, I will post this sort of info under Blogging Citizen/Journalism”)

Race Relations Begin with Empathy

I was an ignorant, arrogant, Southern white boy in college when I was asked to consider W.E.B. Du Bois’ famous statement: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” I could not have told you what he meant by that, other than that he was saying something about race and racism.

My college cohort of fellow education majors was asked to fill out a questionnaire of sorts, one based on Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” One to five for whether I had encountered bandages that match my skin tone. One to five if I could be late to a meeting without it reflecting on my race. One to five if, when I ask to speak to the person in charge, that person will likely be of my race.

Then we added up our numbers and lined up in order from least to greatest. My college, and this specific cohort, was a diverse one, and the ensuing visual was a perfect reflection of “the color line.”

The darkest-skinned African American was on one side of the room, while I, one of the lightest-skinned whites, was on the other. The highest degree of cultural capital or privilege rested with the lightest-skinned persons, while the greatest measure of persecution and negative assumption fell on the person in the room with skin (and experience) the most unlike mine.

I started to better understand that connection between privilege and power. That privilege is power.

I had never seen anything like this, never considered that I was privileged, much less that this privilege was because I was white. It was the first time I realized not only that I had privilege, but that this privilege gave me unearned and unrealized advantages.

Sadly, this revelation did more to illuminate my own self-perception of being white — though that is important — rather than helping me understand what it meant to be a person of color in the United States. I had self-understanding without its deeply helpful and imperative companion — empathy.

Not long after this awakening to whiteness, both its racial and cultural components, I learned of a special conversation most black children receive, known as “the Talk.” Hearing that such a talk existed, I started to better understand that connection between privilege and power. That privilege is power.

Asa father of three young children, I get all the smiles from all the women when I take my kids on walks without my wife, or really go anywhere at all — grocery stores, the hardware store, parks. The men usually look sorry for me. I had one man see me loading my kids into our van come up and say, really sarcastically and with a snort, “Good luck, buddy.”

But the women can’t get enough of it. It is like they are so surprised and grateful a man is out with his kids that they just cannot help but smile. I realized that these women actually were surprised and grateful.

I live in a city where there are more than a handful of fellas I get to give the ol’ nod to as we each push a stroller or strap on a kid or load a van. But the women still always look impressed, as if I am doing something superhuman, rather than just fatherly. A woman even asked me at the grocery store one day if I was enjoying “daddy duty.” Show me any woman anywhere who has been asked if she was on “mommy duty.”

As a father out with my kids — and I am out with them quite a bit in the summers, being a teacher — I never feel judged. Rather, I feel like a million bucks.

Usually.

Because there is a darker side to being an out-and-about father. Once I met a little boy at the park. He precociously and excitedly came up to me at a picnic table and started talking, leaving behind the other kids and counselors in his day camp group. My heart started beating fast and I began to sweat a little. I quickly made sure to smile at the counselors, sit closer to my own snacking kids, and immediately pulled out their water bottles to put them on the table, so everyone would know I was not just sitting at a park watching kids play by myself.

Obviously, my worry here was that people would think I was the next sexual predator out to get this kid. The sole reason I had this fear was because I was male.

People who might assume this are not out of line. The vast majority of sex offenders are male. And I would argue that one of the main reasons why males are so often the predators is because they have so much cultural and physical power. The very reason males are able to be predators is because there is such opportunity to abuse power.

But the more specific reason my heart started beating so fast was because of a flashback I had to another episode in college, an episode that ushered in some empathy and increased my understanding of the color line.

Because I was an elementary education major in college, my classmates and professors were almost entirely female. Once, two professors — one black and one white — pulled me and the only other male elem major aside after class. They sat us down and asked if anyone had had “the talk” with us yet.

I looked at my friend and shook my head. My professors went on to tell me that as a male teacher there would be many things I would need to consider. That when I got a teaching job my coworkers would assume I would eventually peace out and head into administration — because I was a male. That I could never ever be alone in a room with a student, much less with the door closed — because I was a male. That I should rarely if ever hug or even touch students — because I was a male. That it would take one accusation of misconduct, whether true or false, to derail my career — because I was a male.

I left the talk feeling frenzied and processing many other emotions. Chief among them — fear.

I received the talk because I was male, and that made me feel singled out, shameful, and (admittedly) a bit special, but also unfairly judged, like I had already done something wrong and been found guilty. What I did not realize and unpack until over a decade later was that the talk I got in college was in large part because I held all the privilege and power.

All the assumptions made about me because I was male were assumptions of privilege — that I probably could go into administration if I wanted to but that I would just need to put out some good PR with my colleagues to smooth it over on my way up the ladder; that I could abuse those I wanted to because I had the cultural and physical power to arrange such a situation. I did not see until later that it was a privilege for someone to assume I would want more and could likely get it.

My version of the talk and the assumptions and the realities were still laden with privilege. What made this all the more ironic was that I was actually sitting next to a male classmate who was black. He received the other Talk, I’m sure, but this one was about gender, not race.

Iam talking, of course, about the Talk he likely got from his family about being a black man in America. And while I experienced some of the weight of the gender line at the park that day and after class that morning in college, the color line is far, far more ferocious and sinister. It will take nothing short of a supernatural act to surmount it.

The goal is simply to get home safely, not to make a statement about the United States, and certainly not to convert someone to the belief that you are human. The bar is far lower than that, a primeval survival mode.

One of the most impactful authors I read during the period I became aware of racial dynamics was James Baldwin. He talks about “the conundrum of color,” and what a conundrum it is. The color line in the U.S. has led to many a violent altercation between black people and the police, particularly white police.

For white kids, when we say “the talk,” we usually mean conversing about the birds and the bees, about sex and condoms and how to say no. For black kids in America the reason for the Talk is no conundrum, no mystery. Black kids are disproportionately questioned, arrested, and killed by police. And we all know it. We cannot debate these statistics; rather, we debate why they are so and what to do with them.

The Talk for African Americans is nearly the same in all black households. If you are black and ever pulled over by the police, follow some rules that increase the chance for survival: be polite and respectful, stay calm, do not make any sudden moves, do what the police say, do not argue, and most important of all — always, always keep hands in sight.

This is not a question of if someone who is black is pulled over by the police, but when. The goal is simply to get home safely, not to make a statement about the United States, and certainly not to convert someone to the belief that you are human. The bar is far lower than that, a primeval survival mode.

All of this requires African Americans to have to look at and treat each police officer as a unit rather than as individuals. For their survival, blacks have to look at police in a similar way many white police look at someone with dark skin — not as an individual but as someone who is part of a lumped together, stereotyped group. Not all white police officers will shoot before they think, but to assume otherwise can be fatal.

There is a constant orientation to whiteness and the consideration of it, to the realty that privilege is power, since what defines race relations in our country is an imbalance of power.

PBS recently put out a documentary called The Talk: Race in America in which Samaria Rice, mother of 12-year-old Tamir, said, “If he was a white boy, I believe he would still be alive.” Tamir was a black boy shot and killed by a white officer in 2014. Listing Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, and Trayvon Martin does not even begin to scratch the surface of the list. There are women. There are people of color other than African Americans. There is a gruesome parade of people whose lives were ended and whose legacies the criminal justice system has maligned that reinforces the absolute necessity for people of color to prepare for an inevitable encounter with police.

I will never have this Talk with my son or daughter. I do not need to. And that is a privilege. It is a blessing. I feel both thankful and ashamed, thankful that my kids will not be plagued with this kind of racial bias and ashamed that my kids have done absolutely nothing to earn a reprieve from that.

Will I give them general principles for how to engage an officer if pulled over? Sure. But that conversation will not be laced with the possibility of them being killed solely or primarily because of their race.

For parents of color, there is not only one Talk. There are many, often daily. Because an encounter with police is not the only place where people of color are in danger. It is a way of life, one foreign to my hue. There is a constant orientation to whiteness and the consideration of it, to the realty that privilege is power, since what defines race relations in our country is an imbalance of power.

When I learned about the Talk for African Americans, I initially felt indignant, like it was an overdramatic reaction. After learning the statistics, my indignity turned to sadness. Then anger. Now I have corralled those emotions enough to experience something else — empathy.

What my color line experience in college taught me was that the most important element in understanding race is empathy. I distinguish this from sympathy in that sympathy is understanding someone else’s plight, whereas empathy is actually taking on the emotions of others.

Empathy requires something of your mind and body, a transfer of consciousness, an awareness and account for another and his or her experience. You cannot be truly empathetic and leave unchanged. This is the supernatural act. It is not “natural” to identify with others, because identifying with others requires sacrifice, loss, coming under someone out of love.

Empathy is the gateway to reconciliation. Or, rather, empathy is the start of and the road to reconciliation. You cannot have one without the other.

Defining empathy is more than a little difficult. The more you try to define it, the more you cheapen and confuse. But we know it when we see it. Empathy begins with seeing ourselves rightly. We are broken people. All of us. Bryan Stevenson, the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and another figure who showed me empathy in practice, has said

I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others.

His comment is in reference to those on death row, but that consideration of brokenness can also have an effect on our world where black boys and girls might not survive without the Talk.

Bryan Stevenson giving a TED Talk. 

Empathy is the gateway to reconciliation. Or, rather, empathy is the start of and the road to reconciliation. You cannot have one without the other.

What does this look like? It begins with a recognition of our common brokenness as people. We are all faulty and fallen, but we are also luminous creatures, simply because we are humans. We are unique in creation, a concept Christians and Jews label as being made in the “image and likeness of God.”

Early in my teaching career I received a grant to go to a conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Of all the things I learned that weekend, I was most struck by how the instructors drilled into us that conducting a Holocaust simulation lesson in our classrooms was inappropriate. They cautioned us against taping off boxcars on our floor and having students stand in them, students writing from the fictional perspective of someone in the Holocaust, students being given stars on their clothes and spending 30 minutes experiencing persecution simply because of the star.

The message these simulations send is that, once completed, someone knows what it feels like to be in the Holocaust. Or to be on a slave ship. Or to be an American Indian on the Trail of Tears.

I know my experience can move me down the path of empathy but will never get me all the way there. I am not sure I could handle it if it did.

There are limits to empathy. I am white. I will never fully know what it feels like to be an African American, to fear daily for the safety of my body, or to be connected by my daily experience to such resplendent figures like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. I try to access those feelings through reading, and I accessed a piece of this when my college professors pulled me aside that day.

When a white person receives the talk, however, it is still coming from a place of privilege. My gender and race implicitly communicated notions of power, not powerlessness.

When a black person receives the Talk, it is out of necessity and because of an assumption of inferiority in our culture.

By comparing my talk in college to the Talk blacks receive, I am not making a false equivalency. I am making a human one. There was something shared because, on a human level, I was given a momentary glimpse I will never fully experience or fully understand. And that is all it was — a glimpse. I know my experience can move me down the path of empathy but will never get me all the way there. I am not sure I could handle it if it did.

I call white people to three things. If a black person articulates his or her experience to you, consider the following:

First, listen. This requires silence, lots of nodding, maybe grunts of affirmation. Have a demeanor of reception to the person’s words, the person’s story.

Second, emphasize to the person that you may have a framework for some of this, as I felt I did with my experience in college, but that you will never fully understand.

Third, believe. Believe the best about the person and believe in the person’s experience. Do not refute it, ignore it, or try to relate to it in any way that signals you feel you “get it.” You don’t. I don’t. I never will. But I get humans, and I get feeling alone and afraid and scorned.

When a white person receives the talk, as I did, part of it is to underscore that our skin communicates pulsating power in each room we enter. That is a great shame as well as a great responsibility. I am working to figure out what that means for me as an adult, and now I am obligated to communicate this to my white children. As they get older and I talk more about skin color, I hope to lead the conversation by impressing on them the importance of empathy and humility.

James Baldwin wrote, “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” I do not want my children merely to avoid debasing others; I want them to recognize and rejoice in everyone’s humanity, to bestow a recognition of something that whites do not confer­ but that innately is already in all people — dignity.

James Baldwin. .

Very near the end of his life, Baldwin said, “There is a capacity in black people for experience, simply. And that capacity makes other things possible. It dictates the depth of one’s acceptance of other people. The capacity for experience is what burns out fear.” I am not really sure of all that he means here, but I know he is saying that African Americans have something I do not. It is more than pigmentation; it is a well inside them of experience, experience that has led many to compassion.

My experience is not equivalent to others, nor theirs to mine, but my humanity is.

Bryan Stevenson believes

we are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent…. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

My experience is not equivalent to others, nor theirs to mine, but my humanity is. And I hope I and others can harness that commonality so that, while our degrees and types of suffering might be incomparable, we can move toward compassion, empathy, and healing.