Empathy and Racism
Empathy and Racism
I want to discuss a sensitive topic: the cause(s) of racism. I will not discuss all aspects of what is doubtless a complex phenomenon, especially virulent, violent, institutional racism; I will discuss a specific universal non-malicious cause of racism. And by racism I will mean lack of empathy for people of races different from one’s own. I want to know what accounts for an inability to empathize, or empathize fully, with people of other races; in particular, failure to empathize with people of other colors. This is a limited topic but I think the theory I propose gets to the heart of the general phenomenon—color-dependent inability to feel empathy (or full empathy). We are apt to empathize with people the same color as us but not a different color—the explanation of this is my sole concern here. To empathize with X is to put oneself in the position of X and feel the emotion of empathy. This is an imaginative project: you imagine yourself in the position of X—you imagine being that person. The content of the imaginative act is, “If I were X, I wouldn’t like what is happening to me”. You identifywith X: if you were identical to X, you wouldn’t like it. I am concerned with the possibility of this kind of empathetic imaginative act in the case of people of a different color. Call it Color-Dependent Empathy Deficiency Syndrome (CDEDS).
The explanation I offer takes off from a simple fact: it is hard to imagine yourself being of a different color. You can easily imagine living in a a different town or a different country or having a different job or having a different hairstyle, but it is not easy to imagine being of a different color. It takes an effort and it may not succeed—the effort may not be a complete success. Maybe, ultimately, it is not possible at all. It would be different if you had a memory image of being another color because you once were, but short of that it doesn’t come easy. The reason is not far to seek: you have been the color you are your whole life; it is deeply engraved in your brain; you are confronted by it constantly—and it is hard to undo these facts. It is likewise hard to imagine that the sky is yellow or that grass is purple; it goes against all your experience. It takes a real effort of mind to imagine such things; maybe you are really not up to the challenge—it’s not something you have ever been trained to do. Similarly, you have a strongly ingrained image of yourself as of a certain color and trying to change that is a hard task. It’s a bit like trying to imagine yourself as having four eyes or two mouths: you know what the words mean but you have trouble forming a concrete image of what they mean—it just goes against your whole experience of yourself. Your imagination is just not that flexible. If you ask me to imagine being a woman, I will tell you that I find it difficult, because I am so used to being a man—though I can easily imagine being dressed as a woman (I did it the other day). The imagination has limits, weaknesses, blind spots.
So, suppose a person P observes a person of another color in some kind of distress. P tries to imagine himself being that person, but it proves difficult, because he can’t imagine himself having that color. He can’t make an identification. Then P will not have engaged in the mental act that is necessary for empathy to occur. Thus, he will not feel empathy—or not to the same degree as he would for a person the same color as he is. P will have reduced empathy, maybe much reduced. Let’s take a case close to the topic at hand: animals. It is a truism that we empathize with animals in proportion to their physical proximity to us—mammals more than reptiles, say. Since no animal closely resembles us, we tend to lack empathy compared to our empathy for other humans. We can’t easily put ourselves into the animal’s position, imagining ourselves to be a mongoose, say. The question, what would I feel if I were a mongoose, has little sense for us; we can’t imagine being a mongoose. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine oneself being of a different color, because we are steeped in the color we are. If humans went through one color phase and them morphed into another, things would be different—we would find it easy to imagine being another color when confronted by a being the same color as our earlier self. But this doesn’t happen, so the mechanism of empathy breaks down, partially or wholly. We can conceive of beings who completely lack empathy for any being not physically just like them, because they have no capacity of imaginative projection into another type of being—they can only imagine being a being just like themselves. They would be complete racists and speciesists where empathy is concerned. We are better than this, but we are not perfect. Thus, we favor other beings that are similar to ourselves physically. In the case of human skin color, we are biased in favor of our own skin color because it impresses us so strongly. (If we had never even seen a person of another color, we would be even more precluded from extending empathy towards them, because our imagination would have nothing to go on but our own color.) It is hard to imagine being a life-form that is completely or saliently dissimilar to you, because your own physical form determines your sense of your own identity. You find it difficult to imagine being someone whose nature is different from your own nature. This inability underlies what I am calling racism, i.e., deficient empathy for other races. Racism is not the result (only) of arbitrary malice, stupidity, prejudice, and indoctrination; it is also, and centrally, the result of an intelligible imaginative limitation. Even if you want badly not to have a racist bone in your body, your imagination will pull you in a different direction; and you will have to fight it. You will, at a minimum, have to put some work into empathetic identification. The color of a person is a deep fact about him or her, recognized as such, so it’s hard to shed it in imaginative empathetic acts; it’s not unlike one’s species or basic anatomy. None of this is to say that speciesism or racism is a good thing; it is clearly a bad thing. But it is an intelligible thing not just an arbitrary prejudice; it has roots in the workings of the human imagination. Maybe accepting this can lessen its hold on us.[1]
[1] There is an episode of Star Trek in which two aliens are half white and half black but with the colors reversed: one is white on the left side and the other is black on that side. We are encouraged to see that their prejudice is completely irrational, and so it is. But this case is not like our own, because they are acquainted with both colors in their own bodies, while we are not. It should be easy for them to imagine being chromatically like the other, but it is not so easy for us. The color you are may not be a metaphysically necessary truth about you but it is surely a deep truth—part of how you see yourself (literally). This is why you would be shocked to look at yourself in the mirror one day and find yourself to have changed color. Color may only be skin deep, but skin is an important and salient part of a person. People care a lot about their skin: it is a locus of beauty, sensation, health, and individual identity.
“So, suppose a person P observes a person of another color in some kind of distress. P tries to imagine himself being that person, but it proves difficult, because he can’t imagine himself having that color.”
Perhaps how difficult it is to empathize depends upon whether the person’s distress is related to his color. Compare two situations: (1) a white person witnesses a white mob threatening a Black person because of his race, (2) a white person witnesses an auto accident in which Black person in the car needs help. Perhaps a racist white person would be more likely to empathize with the victim in the second situation.
“Similarly, you have a strongly ingrained image of yourself as of a certain color and trying to change that is a hard task.”
Suppose you’ve been blind from birth. You’ve been told that people are of different colors and what your color is, but that might not be sufficient to create a strongly ingrained image of yourself as of a certain color. Can someone who has been blind from birth even understand the concept of color?
A blind person would not have the the kind of ingrained self-image (with respect to color) a sighted person has, and so should be less inclined to color-based racism. I doubt that blind people are biased against differently colored people.
The question of the concept of color possessed by the congenitally blind person has been much discussed.
Your argument is well reasoned and has a lot of truth but, some like myself who are aphantasic (blind in the mind’s eye) are like the blind in the limited sense in which race figures in their imagination; though skin color is not exactly like hair color, it is to me largely a secondary property you might say; to me as a Jew, and an Israeli to an extent, I make my efforts to understand the Palestinians and the Arabs and the Muslims, more than people of color; further, someone like Shakespeare was myriad minded and could grasp an Othello; and if in the sense that in the existential sense we are all strangers to others, some who like Shakespeare have that capacity of imagining others, can understand or imagine other races and other sexes. I won’t bring up the other theory that racism is culturally contingent, because though possible, it’s not quite appealing to my tastes
My argument hinged on not being able to imagine oneself as another color, not being unable to imagine people of another color.
True. A Sunderland fan could never, under any circumstance, conceive of themselves as black and white!
There are occasions, though, when I’ve had an acute sense of my own skin colour such as situations I experienced as the only white person in large groups of others in India and South Africa.
It’s an interesting fact that we are more attached to our skin color than our hair color.
Interesting. This is a meaty post. One that inspires a lot of thoughts. I’ll share this secret: one idea I had long ago is to create an interactive work of art wherein you have two lifelike renderings of people facing each other. One black. One white. Designed so someone can peer through the back of one of the heads, enabling a black person to see themself as white, or a white person to see themself as black (there would be a large mirror behind each figure).
Fleshy, you might say.