I

As a global society, humans are getting empathy wrong. Both lessons taught and lessons learned have left us with what some identify as an “empathy gap” – social divisions, human disconnections, and missed communications. Psychologists Judith Hall and Mark Leary, in “The U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit: Here’s What We Can Do about It,” contend:

The creation and existence of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy (Santa Barbara, CA), with its mission to create a “global empathy movement,” is premised on this lack of empathy that manifests in arguably some of the worse human behaviors and circumstances that define the conditions of being human: “People are not understanding each other across the gulf of race, class, religion, etc.; violence; conflicts, war, genocide; hunger, disease, poverty; refugees; climate change, environmental degradation; overwhelm, alienation, depression, fear, hopelessness; People are not caring about each other” (“The Problem,” Center for Building a Culture of Empathy website).Footnote ³ This Center offers several quotations by former U.S. President Barack Obama to underscore this empathy deficit, which he, too, defines problematically as “the inability of people to stand in other folks’ shoes,” and insisting that “We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes” (Center website).Footnote ⁴ While there may be no single agreed-upon definition of empathy, perhaps what is easier to identify is pointing out what is not empathy. To watch someone drowning with no concern or effort to assist or support the person can signal a lack of empathy, whether or not the observer knows how to swim or how to save a drowning person. Of course, this presumes that we are observant enough to know that the person is not just playing in the water and fake drowning. Just a month after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, I used this same systemic-U.S.-racism-and-drowning metaphor in a telephone interview with Arizona Republic reporter Karina Bland for her piece, “What Should We [White People] Do to Fight Racism? We Are Asking the Wrong People.”Footnote ⁵ Here is Bland’s story as it recounts our conversation and her more empathy-specific takeaway:Footnote ⁶

Leading with empathy would mean that an observer would do something, not just watch and wait, as did three police officers when an unsheltered person dove into the Tempe Town Lake and they watched a human drown, allegedly because they did not have training on water rescues.Footnote ⁷ One need not imagine oneself drowning to be propelled into action if empathy leads actions and interactions.

Indeed, President Obama and Hall and Leary, above, miss the mark about empathy by reverting to this unhelpful refrain in their final advice regarding closing the “empathy gap”: “Take the time to ask those you encounter how they are feeling, and really listen.Footnote ⁸ Try to put yourself in their shoes” (emphasis added). How does one imagine oneself drowning? This last part about being in another’s shoes – assuming that the other person actually has shoes – is what Project Humanities at Arizona State University argues needs to be reconsidered and rethought. I, too, as a scholar, subscribed partially to this problematic notion of empathy in my 2015 op ed piece, “Seeing the World through Another’s Eyes,” wherein I mention more than once the need to imagine another’s reality.Footnote ⁹ These many years later, I see this as an impossibility. However, I still feel that we can, “If nothing else, … be empathetic enough to acknowledge the legitimacy of another’s lived experience that is not and cannot be exactly our own.”Footnote ¹⁰ Scott Monty is yet another industry leader who gets empathy wrong in this common distinction between sympathy and empathy:Footnote ¹¹

There is absolutely no way to match pains, no matter how imaginative we believe ourselves to be. This daughter’s pain does not need to be matched but rather responded to. To center this parent’s memory of hitting their head likely does little to center this child in this moment but, rather, shifts focus to the parent. This is where, how, and why empathy fails.

II

When George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in May 2020, well-meaning white friends and colleagues approached me as an African American male with this refrain: “I don’t know what it’s like to be Black, but…” more times than I can count. While I understand this is a reaction to something that is so horrific that they don’t know how to respond, it does little to comfort or bridge an ever-existing experiential divide. Arguably, this response does quite the opposite, because the very phrase itself centers the person observing, not the person experiencing the upset, pain, suffering, or loss. In fact, my white editor friend, Elizabeth McNeil, offered this alternative perspective in responding to this U.S. race moment: “Why does one have to be Black to be totally anguished and outraged at Floyd’s murder?” This is precisely the question I asked in my post-George Floyd murder op ed response, “‘No, I Am Not OK.’ Thanks for Asking,” in working through my own complex spectrum of emotions:

While my response above was called “virtual signaling” by at least one presumably non-Black column reader, I realize now that the piece was asking for empathy rather than the sympathy that too many progressive white readers and respondents registered. These folks rested in a sadness that moved them nowhere. The many responses from Black folks who also experienced deep frustration, pain, and anger appreciated my piece, shared it, and re-shared it. It has been the most-circulated piece of intentionally public-facing writing from all my years in academia. Both those inside and beyond the academy expressed their emotional and spiritual connection with the sentiments of the piece.

In reality, so many – no matter the circumstance – have witnessed or even offered this meaningless refrain when responding to another person’s loss, especially in death: “I know how you feel, since I….” While this response is somewhat programmed as an uncritical social expectation and etiquette ritual, it falls short of acknowledging and centering the person who at that moment is experiencing the emotional upset. What is troubling in these responses is not the authenticity of the comments but, rather, the fact that this kind of uncritical response is not a demonstration of empathy.

Indeed, the typical “I know how you feel” sort of response signals how problematic teachings about empathy are and continue to be from childhood through adulthood. Too often, research and fictional literature tell us that empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes,” “seeing the world through another’s eyes,” or “stepping into someone else’s skin.” In business, effective leadership based in empathy supposedly looks like this:

In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, attorney Atticus Finch, attempting to teach his young daughter Scout to have empathy for the racial underdogs in the segregated Deep South, offers this parental advice: “‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”Footnote ¹⁴ What the father is asking of his young daughter is an impossibility. She cannot possibly do this to understand anything about race relations that is not her own experience. It does not mean, however, that Scout – even as a child – cannot understand that treating a Black man unfairly and making false accusations about a sexual assault is wrong. She need not walk in anyone’s skin except her own to recognize and understand discrimination, lies, and crime. No one else’s skin fits them like their own skin. Additionally, feet are like fingerprints, unique to their owner. So, no matter how much walking around in another’s shoes – if in fact the individual has shoes, and not everyone does – that may occur, the fit for different folks will be different, and there’s no way to know how another experiences a fit; thus, adults and children are being taught a (figurative) impossibility without question or clarity.

The reality is that these figures of speech and other imagination games are impossibilities. The very nature of imagining is that what is conjured up is not real, akin to the problematic simulation exercises that allegedly teach folks about systemic racism, as in university “Tunnel of Oppression” tours such as this one:

• • Increasing awareness of oppression and discrimination and their impact on people.

• • Evoking an enlightened and educated discussion.

• • Bringing about positive changes.Footnote ¹⁵

Not only is this exercise futile in creating empathy in participants, but it is here couched in the language of “touring,” as though a foray into “trauma or poverty porn.” Such is the case as well with the variations on mostly college students living in a cardboard box for a week on $2 to “understand” what it means to be unsheltered. For those participating in such exercises, this artificial activity is the very opposite of empathy and more experiential exploitation that severely limits awareness of the complexities of anyone’s actual lived experience. Centering race specifically, Alisha Gaines, author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, calls out these futile efforts – “empathetic racial impersonation” (“Alisha Gaines Investigates”) – to get into another’s skin to understand an experience.Footnote ¹⁶ Gaines’s thinking on this matter emerged from this observation: “A peculiar desire seems to still haunt white people: ‘I wish I knew what it was like to be Black.’ This wish is different from wanting to cosplay the coolness of Blackness – mimicking style, aping music and parroting vernacular. This is a presumptive, racially imaginative desire, one that covets not just the rhythms of Black life, but for its blues,”Footnote ¹⁷ however temporarily. Gaines traces the literary and journalistic histories of white folks who take on what they see as the stero(typical) Black traits – skin, hair, mannerisms, eye coloring, and speech patterns – to pass as Black so as to unveil what Blackness is and what it is not allegedly more authentically than Black folks’ lived experiences and testimonials could possibly communicate and document. About these white people’s deeply reductive and fundamentally racist performances ranging from the 1940’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ray Sprigle’s memoir In the Land of Jim Crow (1949) to John Howard Griffin’s 1960’s Black Like Me (1961) memoir to Grace Halsell’s 1969 memoir Soul Sister and most recently Canadian-American journalist Sam Forster’s 2024 “firsthand account of modern life as a person of color”Footnote ¹⁸ account Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in Modern America, Gaines concludes that such performances “end up reinforcing stereotypes and failing to address systemic racism, while conferring a false sense of racial authority…. To believe that the richness of Black identity can be understood through a temporary costume trivializes the lifelong trauma of racism. It turns the complexity of Black life into a stunt.”Footnote ¹⁹

Indeed, one person’s experience cannot possibly match another’s, since no two people can ever have the same exact experience. It is presumptuous of us all, then, to pretend that we can know how or what another person feels. Think of the times when we experience emotions so complicated that even we cannot articulate them. To imagine that anyone can know or understand how we feel or how another feels in any moment of intense emotion is even more problematic. What we can do, however, is learn the skills of observing another who is upset or discombobulated, then asking and responding in a way that centers that individual and not ourselves and our failed imaginaries.

Self-reflective reaction is how many – if not most of us humans – have been taught to practice empathy may well explain why we are not more emotionally connected or concerned about other folks: we cannot really imagine something that another person or living non-human is really feeling. In one example of imaginative play that fails children, Claire Lerner and Rebecca Parlakian, in “How to Help Your Child Develop Empathy,” offer this game of pretend as an empathy-teaching strategy for toddlers: “Use pretend play.Footnote ²⁰ Talk with older toddlers about feelings and empathy as you play. For example, you might have your child’s stuffed hippo say he does not want to take turns with his friend, the stuffed pony. Then ask your child: How do you think pony feels? What should we tell this silly hippo?” Such games are problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is that the adult seems to be setting up a circumstance that has a “right” response, the response that this adult wishes to get. What happens if this child’s response does not match the adult’s expectation? How is any adult equipped imaginatively, emotionally, spiritually, or otherwise able to imagine how a stuffed animal feels? Whether on the playground or in the board room, these misguided lessons about empathy are the same. In the business world, effective leaders are asked to become “skilled at understanding a situation from another person’s perspective” and “to imagine oneself in the situation of another, experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person.”Footnote ²¹ Such games of pretend for adults and children potentially lessen the ability to connect authentically with ordinary problems faced by other people. Certainly, with such complexities of human emotions, must “understanding” be a prerequisite to connecting with and responding to another’s lived experience?

III

Perhaps a more effective way to talk and think about and then practice and model empathy is to consider empathy as “being with” rather than “being for” another person. While Daron K. Roberts, in A Kids Book about Empathy, references the problematic “stand in someone else’s shoes” trope in distinguishing empathy from sympathy, they do offer a more substantive and critically important distinction in this definition:

“Being with” means that there is no reason to have to imagine or even understand anything to make a human connection that soothes. There is absolutely no reason to engage in a futile effort to make another’s experience somehow a distorted mirror of one’s own experience. Empathy is being present with the person and not being coerced or expected to engage in a kind of hypothetical exercise of imagining.

My take on empathy is not to suggest that imagination can play absolutely no role in empathy practice but, rather, offers that conversations and deep thinking about empathy cannot start and stop with imagination. However problematic imagination is, it can certainly be one strategy of demonstrating empathy, but, again, this strategy centers the imaginer, not the lived experience of the person in duress. A week after George Floyd’s murder, filmmaker Kasi Lemmons offered this provocative take on the inability of some white Americans to imagine Floyd’s dying, the agony of the witnesses to his murder, or similar real effects of persistent systemic U.S. racism:

Lemmons concludes that the harsh reality is that some people – in this case white folks – are not just incapable of imagining but have no interest in imagining what Black people’s suffering is like.Footnote ²⁴ Three months after Floyd’s murder and the global Black Lives Matter protests, an NPR/KJZZ Morning Edition story, “As Nation Reckons with Race, Poll Finds White Americans Least Engaged,” echoed Lemmons’s conclusion of white apathy:

Filmmaker Lemmons frames this reality of emotional disconnect or lack of empathy as a lack of moral curiosity that allows systems of oppressions more broadly to exist and persist:

Until humans develop and witness the skills of observation, of human connection, of a willingness to care about what another human is experiencing, imagination does absolutely nothing to demonstrate and manifest human ties. In the film version of the John Grisham’s novel A Time to Kill, which recounts the rape of a young Black girl, the white defense attorney (played by Matthew McConaughey) uses an imagination strategy to get the mostly white jury – and largely white film audience – to care about the little girl and her father, who is on trial for killing the two white rapists:Footnote ²⁷

That McConaughey’s character ends the scene by asking the jurors to “imagine she’s white” suggests that only when we can imagine an experience as our own or close to our own does another’s experience even matter to us. In another demonstration of consciously refusing to disrupt systemic racism against Black people, anti-racist educator Jane Elliot – author of the famous Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes social exercise with white Iowa third-graders to teach a lesson about the arbitrariness of U.S. racism and white privilege immediately after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – offered to her 19 September 1995 Chapman University (Orange, CA) white lecture audience this Black/white race proposition:

Elliott’s exercise here is not about imagining but about acknowledging. That no one in the white audience stands speaks volumes about an unwillingness to abandon their white privilege in an effort to connect with another’s circumstance in the cause of social justice. And when a failure of imagination occurs, where can we go to find understanding and to practice empathy? Harvard Crimson columnist David E. Lewis addresses the problem of empathizing in “Unlearning Empathy Politics” from their column “Unlearning Everything”:

Framed this way, to imagine the impossible is indeed impossible, and empathy does not require imagination of some future reality but rather a focus on the present, the here and now.

IV

Under the umbrella of demystifying “humanities” as a discipline for those both inside and beyond the academy, Project Humanities at Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ) – the multiple award-winning university initiative that I founded and have directed for the past thirteen years – defines humanities in our tagline “talking, listening, connecting.” Talking, listening, and connecting can take myriad forms and formats to invite the possibility that discovery of self and others can occur when individuals and communities engage in these three actions critical to empathy understanding and practice.

In particular, Project Humanities sees empathy within a rainbow of connected human responses to other human experiences. We call these connected principles Humanity 101®, which is not an academic course but rather a challenge to ourselves and each other to do better and to be better by living these values: compassion, empathy, forgiveness, intergity, kindness, respect, and self-reflection. These principles are not faith-based but rather are based on a faith in humanity and the human possibility to be better and to do better. We see these principles as overlapping and as layers that flow seamlessly into the others while retaining their distinct hue across cultures, geographic boundaries, ages, and communities. To redefine empathy in such a way that it does not ask individuals to do what is impossible but, instead, empowers individuals to take an action that only they can do to comfort and support individuals – whether or not they can ever understand intellectually or emotionally another’s experiences – is pretty radical. In addressing systemic injustices, this approach aligns with Lewis’s sentiment in “Unlearning Empathy Politics,” wherein they address head-on this notion that empathy alone will address systemic social injustices:

Lewis further points out the often-ignored connection between empathy and ableism:

Indeed, perhaps the easiest, most authentic, and most accessible way to demonstrate empathy is to observe, ask, listen, and act, as in the following examples.

In Figure 1, the child with the blue backpack does not necessarily ask the child with the green lunchbox what they need but, rather, acts based on an observation. While the poster names this human connection as kindness, this is also a demonstration that language, words, and articulation are not always accessible for complex emotional realties in a moment. That the child with the blue backpack “took his hand and told him it would be ok” is certainly a response that demonstrates empathy. That the poster adds “Imagine the world if we all looked out for each other like this little champion” reframes imagination as the possibility of human connection, not as a game de-centering the one experiencing the disruption. Figure 2 follows this same demonstration of empathy when an observant flight attendant, responding to a distressed passenger, “explained every sound and bump and even sat … holding her hand when it still got to be too much for her.” These two individuals respond to a circumstance wherein their perceptive observations of others in distress do not lead with the fundamental impossibility and faulty emotional and spiritual prerequisite of “I know how you feel.”

Figure 1.

The Teacher Next Door, “Such a kind soul!” Facebook, May 5, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=the%20teacher%20next%20door%20such%20a%20kind%20soul!.

Figure 2.

Zara Bella/Stranger Things in Stunning World, “Check out this gem of a flight attendant…,” Facebook, May 4, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Zara%20Bella%2C%20Stranger%20Things%20in%20Stunning%20World%2C%20check%20out%20this%20gem%20of%20a%20flight%20attendant.

Such a demonstration of empathy is also clear in a letter posted on Facebook on May 12, 2024, Mother’s Day, by the mother of a recently deceased young adult son (Figure 3). An understanding of empathy within the context of human ties registers in this sentence: “I don’t know your pain, but I’m glad that I was able to experience a small part of the success that stemmed from the impact you nurtured your son to share with others.” This publicly grieving mom responded thusly to the anonymous letter:

Figure 3.

Stacey James McAdoo, “Dear Stacey Mcadoo, Happy Mother’s Day!…,” Facebook, May 12, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161733512203081&set=a.10150119571438081.

This is what empathy looks like, not asking or expecting others, or ourselves, to engage in futile imagination exercises that take us nowhere. This means that we humans have to unlearn past erroneous teachings and embrace the possibility that understanding or pretending to understand another’s experience is not a path to authentic and meaningful human connection.Footnote ³³ Equally important to a discussion of empathy is this sobering fact: Some folks don’t really care what someone else is going through.