On July 5, I hesitated as I left my house to take my son on a walk. He is just over nine months old. He can’t walk yet, so I normally carry him in one of those Baby Bjorn contraptions with him on my chest. Sometimes I take him in the stroller, but the carrier helps him fall asleep. On Tuesday, he was in a cranky mood, so I hoped this walk would at a minimum calm him down and lull him to sleep.
As I locked my front door and walked down my steps, I hesitated and almost went back inside because I thought about the mass shooting that had happened the day before. On July 4, there was a mass shooting in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago not too far from Evanston, Illinois where I attended graduate school at Northwestern University.
Seven people died and more than 30 people were injured. 21-year-old white male and Trump supporter Robert Crimo III was the shooter, and he had lived in that community for most of his life. Crimo’s father, Robert Crimo Jr., even ran for mayor of Highland Park in 2018. Crimo Jr. says that he raised his son with “good morals” and never imagined that his son could do such a thing, yet he also helped his son obtain his gun license. Crimo III legally purchased his assault weapon and he had been planning this attack for months.
If people can be randomly shot and killed by a member of their community while they’re attending a Fourth of July parade, then who is to say that I might not get shot as I carry my child in my neighborhood.
This was an unanticipated thought, but I didn’t go back inside my house. I still went on our walk, and my baby did not fall asleep. Yet as I walked I thought a lot about how American society discusses gun violence and the emotional trauma that comes from the impact and specter of terrorism. And in particular I thought about the distinction between sympathy and empathy as our society attempts to feel and understand the impact of terrorism.
Empathy and Ethnocide
To help sustain and grow The Word with Barrett Holmes Pitner we have introduced a subscription option to the newsletter. Subscribers will allow us to continue producing The Word, and create exciting new content including podcasts and new newsletters.
Subscriptions start at $5 a month, and if you would like to give more you can sign up as a Founding Member and name your price.We really enjoy bringing you The Word each week and we thank you for supporting our work.
During one of the pivotal meetings with my publisher that convinced them to give me a book deal for The Crime Without a Name, we had a long conversation about the importance of empathy.
Ethnocide can be an unpleasant topic as we confront the hard truths of our society, so they wanted to see if I had any ideas about what we could do to counter ethnocide, forge community and transcend our normalized division. To answer their question, I spoke to them about empathy and how empathy is harder to understand than we may think in the context of our ethnocidal society. During this conversation, I told them the story of a white friend of mine whose ancestors owned enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, and how I could empathize with her plight.
Over many successive generations my friend’s family has had more socio-economic opportunities than my family, who on my mother’s side come from free persons of color in Charleston, but they also know that their opportunities derive from an evil person. Their standard of living might be higher, but the distinction between good and evil remains less clear because many of the “good” aspects of their life such as wealth, education, and opportunities derive from an evil enslaver.
If one’s life prioritizes the accumulation of wealth above all else, then my friend’s wealthy, slave-owning ancestor would be considered an admirable man who should be celebrated for generations. But if you value living a good life and being a good person then this ancestor would be an albatross whose repugnant life continues to loom over and undermine one’s efforts to lead a good life.
In this conversation with my publisher, I told them how I would not wish this burden and stain of whiteness on my worst enemy, and that I empathized with my white friend for the hereditary sins of her family.
I am not a white person, so I could not sympathize with my friend. Culturally we are not the same. We do not have “fellow-feeling,” so sympathy is not an option. Instead I needed to “feel-into” or empathize with this friend and imagine the difficulty of trying to forge a good life when you know your way of life derives from bad people.
This story is especially important for understanding our present crises of gun violence and the removal of constitutionally protected rights such as abortion, because the logic of the conservative justices of the Supreme Court is originalism, which aspires to interpret the U.S. Constitution according to the intent of our founding fathers.
My friend’s ancestor was considered a respectable, celebrated, and “good” man during the era of our founding fathers. By recreating the “goodness” of the late 1700s and early 1800s, you end up creating an American present consumed with terror and division.
An originalist interpretation of the second amendment has made it much easier for Americans to possess firearms, and the increased access to deadly weapons is described as “good.” This American “goodness” will incline people like Robert Crimo Jr. to help his son obtain a gun license so that he can legally purchase a deadly weapon. And then when his son terrorizes and kills his neighbors, he is left completely surprised because he believed he raised him with “good” morals.
When your concept of “good” consists of celebrating bad people, it is easy to unknowingly cultivate and disseminate evil and terror in the name of “good.” Additionally, for those white Americans who aspire to liberate themselves from their corrupted understanding of good, they often find out that they are unfamiliar with an uncorrupted goodness, and all they can do is be anti-bad.
Empathy in a Society Without Empathy
The word “empathy” did not exist in the English language until 1909, but the word “sympathy” had already existed for centuries. The absence of empathy and prevalence of sympathy in English often inclines English-speakers to perceive the two words as nearly identical, where the significance of empathy is negated and essentially subsumed into sympathy. I find the unnecessary merging of these two words to be incredibly problematic as we confront the many crises of our society.
The problem with sympathy consuming empathy becomes apparent through the language that American society frequently uses to help Americans understand the impact of various traumas suffered by other Americans.
When people are victims of gun violence, for example, we linguistically encourage Americans to imagine that such a tragedy happened to a loved one in order to adequately grasp the horrors of this trauma. And while this approach can be beneficial, it only ends up merely trying to forge sympathy amongst different groups by trying to find a way to convince them that they are the same. Yet this attempt at sympathy will always fail because it is just as easy to find ways to prove that they are not the same.
For example: with regards to reproductive rights, people are often encouraged to imagine how they would feel if the same injustice befell their wife, daughter, or mother. Americans are encouraged to have “fellow-feeling” or sympathy by imagining that we are all the same because we all have women in our lives.
Yet every time this request is made, we also know that we should not need to engage in this bizarre charade of fellow-feeling because we should not need to forge sympathy to understand that it is beneficial to protect all people in our society and ensure they have access to bodily autonomy in their healthcare services.
Our society yearns for an empathetic discourse and we understand the absurdity of our sympathetic language, but since empathy is still a relatively new concept we still do not know what to say.
The English word “empathy” derives from the German word “Einfühlung” meaning to “feel-into,” so empathy consists of feeling into something considered to be an “other” without having to imagine that you are the same as this other person or thing. You can empathize with a work of art, a fictional character in a book, a tree, an animal, and especially another human being whose life is vastly different than yours.
In empathizing with a work of art, you can have a strong emotional connection to the art and feel the labor of the artists, but it would be absurd to believe that you needed to sympathize with the art or the artist to appreciate the art.
You do not need to believe that you are a tree to appreciate the environment, and you do not need to believe that you are an animal to love your pet. In the same way, you do not need to believe that you are another person to value that person’s existence and believe their experiences.
America’s ethnocidal roots depended on creating a non-white Other without the capacity to feel-into the lives of the oppressed, yet the oppressed were encouraged to sympathize with their oppressors.
As a person of color, it is hard to sympathize with white Americans, but I can empathize with them. And as a parent, I can sympathize with other parents and imagine how horrible it would be for senseless gun violence to befall my family, but most importantly I could empathize with these same people before I became a parent.
When I hesitated to leave my house, the hesitation came from the rush of emotion that often comes from sympathy, but the capacity to continue my walk came from being able to empathize with all Americans who still must leave their homes and try to lead a good life within a society shaped by a dangerous, deadly, and corrupted interpretation of “good.”