The Limits of Empathy

Beyond the Book: What if we just believed people?

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

A little while back my mom called me excited about a moment she had just experienced. Now, please, before I explain this further understand that I am technically 43 years old, but when my mom calls me I’m actually 15.

What I mean is, I immediately forget a lot of the details when my mom calls because I am trying to get off the phone. Not because my mom isn’t a lovely person to talk to - she is, I’m sure - but she’s my mom, ugh. Also, I was trying to cook lunch at the time.

So anyways, my mom called about a moment she had while watching videos of someone explaining systemic hardship they had faced. I think the video was a performance maybe? A song? A poem? I don’t remember more detail than that, sorry! But it was a hardship that my mom (not being in the same marginalized group as the creator of the video) hadn’t been able to relate to before. But this video really did it for her. It helped tie what this person had experienced to hardships in her life and, as she said, she started to really “get it.”

“We need more of this!” she told me excitedly. If we could just get more art, more stories, more expression of our experiences that we could tap into so that we could tie it in to our own lived experiences, we could get people to really care about these issues.

“I mean,” I told her, “You’re describing using empathy.”

Well yes, she said, but this was different. It really worked.

I took a sigh and dove into one of my favorite/least favorite topics to discuss: the limits of empathy.

Empathy is an important part of the human experience. It is felt and experienced in many different ways. It can connect us, it can protect us, it can help us learn from the experiences of others, it can also at times spur us into action with or on behalf of others.

And because of this, almost anyone who has been fighting oppression has at some point or another tried to utilize empathy to get people to care about what is happening to us.

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong?

Have you ever felt unsafe in your home?

What if it was your family?

What if it was you?

We have told our most painful stories to audiences of people who will never feel our fear and heartbreak. We have shared the videos and images of our brutalization in the hopes that maybe, somehow, the viewer will see someone they know in the desperate eyes on the screen.

And what does it get us?

Yes, some people are spurred to action…for a little while. Some people are able to draw connections to their own lives and perhaps even see people like us in their own communities. Where people can draw these connections, where they do feel spurred to action, their privilege - if they decide to and are aware enough to use it for our benefit - can be a real asset to our efforts.

But it so rarely translates to the meaningful solidarity that we need to make real systemic problems. Why? Because empathy has real limits, and over-relying on it can cause real harm. Here are, in my opinion, some of the fundamental problems with empathy as a movement tactic:

1. Empathy triggers strong emotions in the person empathizing. That is not a problem on its own, but combined with privilege it will often become the center focus for the person experiencing the empathy. They are feeling bad or scared or outraged and they want to fix that feeling. Without conscious efforts to decenter oneself, this often leads to surface level, quick-fix actions that have almost no lasting impact, but make the privileged person feel a lot better.

2. When you are in this state of empathy, it is almost always processed through your own privileged lens. Yes, you may have known at one time what it was like to feel unsafe in your own home. But why you felt unsafe was likely different, how long you felt unsafe was, it likely wasn’t compounded by other systemic traumas, you likely had different resources to deal with that unsafety, and what you needed to restore that sense of safety was likely very different. And so in that moment of empathy, without further education and awareness, it is easy to impose your own experiences, your own feelings, your own solutions, and your own definitions of success on a situation that is very different from the one that you experienced. Or, it can cause you to lose empathy or even turn against those same people you once empathized with when they react to the situation differently than you would, or want a solution that is different than you imagine you would have wanted.

3. Some things you just won’t be able to empathize with. Yes, there are some experiences that are pretty universal. There are some basic human needs that are, well, basic human needs. But the difference in lived experience between BIPOC and white people is vast. The difference in lived experience between disabled people and non-disabled people is vast. The difference in lived experience between trans people and cis people is vast. All of the marginalized identities we carry come with incredibly different sets of life experiences that in many ways are not experienced by people outside of those groups at all. It’s not because we’re like, a different species or anything, it’s because EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM that we interact with in the world is designed to help some people, hurt some people, ignore some people, exploit some people - and all in different ways.

   This means that every single system we interact with is a completely different system to someone with a different marginalization than you. What does it mean for me to be pulled over by cops as Black, able-bodied, queer, cis, middle-class woman? Something vastly different than what it means to be pulled over as a Deaf Native person. And both are vastly different than what it means to be pulled over as a Latine Transgender teen, or as a queer sex-worker. And all of those experiences are light years away from what it means for a middle-class white, cis, man to be pulled over. The same cop may pull each of us over, but it will still be a very different cop every time.

   What this means is that there are plenty of times where we will be pulling ourselves apart trying to explain what we are experiencing, to try to trigger that empathy that we need to get you to take action and the info will hit your internal search engine and return zero results. And when that happens, because we are so often told that the human condition is universal, because privilege tells the privileged that their experience is the embodiment of that universality, our cries are met with confusion, dismissal, or hostility.

The truth is, if sharing our painful stories were enough, we’d certainly have gotten everyone on our side by now. We would all be connected. We would all see our shared liberation. We’d all be fighting systemic oppression together. But instead, we keep tearing our wounds back open in hopes that the pain of what is never given time to heal will spur spectators to touch an old-healed scar of their own and decide to do something. Generation after generation we’ve done this. Countless articles, books, movies, plays songs….retraumatizing ourselves, begging, pleading….maybe this time…maybe this time….

But you know, we could just decide to believe people.

We could try to realize in these moments of empathy that what we are experiencing in that moment is our remembered experience, and that the person sharing their current experience with us is living their own experience that is not ours and is different in ways that we often cannot understand. But as keenly as we felt what is being triggered in us - as much as we know that lived experience that is in us - they know their experience too.

Moments of connection matter. I can absolutely, as a Black woman targeted by state violence, imagine my own kids under the rubble in Gaza. I can feel the fear and the devastation of being repeatedly targeted for horrific violence while nobody seems to care. But also I cannot imagine it. No, not for a second. That is a different horror that I am not experiencing, that I hope to never experience - even as the horror triggered in me as a Black mother is real. And so I can take this moment, I can see similarities and use it to better understand shared struggle. I can know that there are unknowable differences in experience and use that knowledge to remind me that regardless of how my lived experiences may give me skills, privilege, and insight that may be valuable to this struggle - none of it is useful if it isn’t what those primarily impacted actually want me to do. And I have to commit to doing that even when I can’t relate, even when it isn’t what I imagine I would do, even when it doesn’t make me feel better.

If there’s one personal experience that I think it’s important to empathize with and to let that empathy guide you it’s this one: not being believed. If you’ve ever not been believed when you really, really needed to be, then you’ll know that it’s the most important thing.

Just believe people.

Believe people who are being actively targeted by our systems. Believe the people who are never heard, never believed. Believe that they understand their lived experiences more than you do. Believe that they know what they need. Believe them when you can’t relate, when it’s inconvenient, when it’s messy. It doesn’t mean that every story that every person tells you will always be true. It means that it will be closer to the truth than your interpretation will ever be. It means that we know that systemic oppression exists. We know that our systems create vastly different lived experiences for people based on their different identities and circumstances. So when people living these vastly different experiences say, “This is impacting me in this way and I need you to do this to help.” Understand that our relative privilege will always pull us further from the truth. Believe that they know better than you.

So yeah, as I continued to cook lunch I basically explained a condensed version of this to my mom. She listened intently. She is committed to learning and has a great heart

. She is someone who is honestly trying to figure out what she can do to make a difference. She took it all in. She asked some questions. She thanked me for the time and let me get back to lunch.

Then a few hours later she texted me and said, “You need to write about that empathy thing. Because a lot of us really don’t get it.”

So here I am writing it. Because I may be 43, but she’s still my mom. And she told me to.