Empty Empathy

This post is part of the November Synchroblog, “Seeing Through The Eyes Of The Marginalized”. A synchroblog is a collection of similar articles or posts made by a diverse group of bloggers who have agreed to blog on the same topic on the same day. You can find a list of all the participants here.

Last week at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Atlanta, I heard a paper on the topic of empathy. It was a good paper and the author and I chatted a little bit after the panel about what I’ve since decided I’m calling empty empathy.

I adapted this from her conception of empathy as the practice of emptying oneself in order to be receptive to another’s story.

Understood this way, empathy means inhabiting a space as the empty subject, fully receptive to the story of an Other who is unlike me. The story washes over me. I feel what it excites in me–or I try to–and then the encounter is over.

This is not enough.

Forget that I can’t come to the encounter as a blank slate. If I try to come as a blank slate, this means I give nothing. It means I come to you looking for what your story can do for me. I come to learn what kind of feelings it creates in me. And yet, I am empty. And you are my Other.

I am the warm little center that the life of this world crowds around.

Don’t get me wrong. There is value in learning to feel. And it is too easy to approach issues of justice with a kind of disinterested pity or to become weighed down by compassion fatigue. Caring matters. It does and I’m not saying it doesn’t.

What I’m saying is that empathy, when it is empty, is not helpful. In fact, it hobbles.

I haven’t yet said anything about looking through the eyes of the marginalized. In a way, I think I’m saying the project is suspect.

I cannot look through any eyes but my own. I am not an empty subject, a semi-omniscient observer who can shift perspective, now seeing through my eyes, not through the eyes of another.

As touches my race and nationality, I occupy a space of privilege. As touches my gender, I do not. My position is complex–too complex to reduce. And likewise, the marginal, whomever we decide they are, should not be called upon to come and be Black for us or be Indigenous for us like a parlor trick. And i cannot inhabit their collective skin like a mask, just to see how it feels.

Don’t mistake me. It is good to listen to many voices. It is good to imagine the world from another point of view. But it is not enough to seek the feeling produced when we encounter these stories, to feel deeply, to talk, to let the life of the world gather around us as its center. This is not enough because it is empty.

We are all caught up in a matrix of subtle, shifting, and diffuse systems of power. We cannot get outside of it. What I can do is claim a position in it that acknowledges the thousand ways in which I am marginalized and marginalizing, oppressed and complicit in the oppression of others. I can claim a position that acknowledges the thousand ways in which my conversation partners are both agents and victims, marginal and marginalized, oppressors and oppressed.

This is an empathy filled with content that speaks of the real connections and cooperation between persons, rather than the empty practices of an empathy built on a dichotomy between my unassailable self and a representation of otherness.

But maybe I’m thinking about it too hard.

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