In our combined decades of experience with equity in public schools—first as urban teachers and now as professors of early, elementary, and secondary education—we often appeal to empathy. And in fact, empathy is foundational to the work of social justice. However, as we provide equity training for universities, we see again and again the way white faculty misunderstand and misuse empathy and in so doing, impede rather than advance the work of equity.
Here’s just one example: In one of our faculty workshops, a Black educator, we’ll call Deja, shared an account of a way in which her son had been racially profiled by a white, suburban police officer. The son was sitting in the back seat of the car that had been stopped and still became the sole object of the officer’s unwarranted attention and interrogation. Thankfully, Deja explained, because her son was in the car with his white friends, the officer did not demand her son leave the car and the situation did not escalate.
A white colleague, we’ll call Allison, listened to the end of Deja’s story and exclaimed, “Ugh! I empathize completely!” And Allison shared her story: Her son, too, had been stopped by a suburban white police officer—he had been speeding. When he presented his driver’s license—which showed that he lived in a nearby city—the officer asked her son what he was doing in the affluent suburb. “I get it,” Allison said, turning to Deja. “It’s so scary as a mom. And it’s not always about race, either.”
Allison’s final comment, “…it’s not always about race,” is a microaggression. And it’s also evidence of a disturbing pattern we see among the white administrators, faculty, and students with whom we work: an abuse of empathy that convinces the white person they are advancing equity when in fact they are obstructing it.
So, now we teach empathy differently when we do our DEI work in universities. We’ve come to call this “equitable empathy.” If you’re white, here’s what you can do to practice an empathy that allies you with the work of social justice in your institution.
Equitable Empathy Practice #1: Connect the Individual Story to the Social Caste Story
When a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) person shares an experience, they know—statistically and viscerally—that the story is not just about an individual. It’s also about the injustices their entire group experiences.
White people usually share stories without this lens because being white doesn’t make their lives more problematic. Because this is true, white people tend not to use the racial hierarchy of our society as the context of their stories; white people’s stories are too often racially ahistorical and color-evasive. In fact, white stories are not usually about being white at all, except, as in Allison’s case, when they use their whiteness to call into question the experiences of their BIPOC colleagues or students. Thus, while Allison shared her story as a way of personally connecting, because she told the story of her white son without the context of our racialized society, she undermined Deja’s experience.
Equitable empathy requires white faculty to connect stories—those they hear from others and their own—to the stories of their social group. In other words, a story about racial profiling isn’t just a story about a worried mom whose son was is in danger; it’s about the larger story of police brutality against BIPOC people and the fear BIPOC families live with that they may be that brutality’s next target. Similarly, a story about a white son asked about what he was doing in the affluent suburb isn’t just a story about the teenager speeding through town; it’s also about the larger story of how being white protects young men from being ticketed, arrested, or imprisoned.
We live in a caste society. White faculty must practice connecting the individual stories they tell to the larger social stories of that caste society and must acknowledge the ways their whiteness protects them from the worst effects of that caste.
Equitable Empathy Practice #2: Amplify the Differences
In an attempt to “walk in someone else’s shoes,” white faculty often over-emphasize their perception of similarity between their stories and BIPOC stories; white faculty can downplay or disregard the differences. These can be well-intentioned efforts to relate to a BIPOC colleague or student or to try to communicate that the person is not alone in their experiences. But ignoring the differences between being white and being BIPOC in the United States underscores what BIPOC communities have long found to be true—they can’t count on white people and institutions (including institutions of learning) to honor their experiences by acknowledging them, hearing them, and responding with racial consciousness. If anything, Allison’s storytelling, even with her intention to be empathetic, actually made Deja feel that she was not safe.
Imagine for a moment two scenarios: In the first, Allison hears Deja’s story. She begins to tell the story of her white son. But then, she realizes she’s telling a story without the racial context that pervades every moment of her colleague Deja’s life. She stops. “Oh, um, Deja? I just realized that what I’m saying is not what you’re saying. My son is white and he deserved to be stopped in the first place. And he got away without even a ticket. Your son wasn’t speeding. He wasn’t even driving. And he was still singled out by a cop? Deja, I see that what happened to your son happened because he was Black. And I’m sorry.”
Or imagine this second, even better scenario: Allison hears Deja’s story. She has an instinct to tell about her white son being pulled over, but she stops herself. Instead she says simply, “I’m learning a lot from the experiences of Black families like yours. That must have been hard to share in a room full of white people. I have a lot more to learn. Thank you.”
Empathy does not require white faculty to point out how their stories are similar, especially when the point of the BIPOC story is to demonstrate the struggle, injustice, and trauma of being BIPOC in the United States. Instead, white faculty can amplify those differences by listening with humility, acknowledging them, and demonstrating a desire to learn.
Equitable Empathy Practice #3: Avoid Telling a Master Narrative
In the name of empathy, white faculty often retell the master narratives they have implicitly learned within their white schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and media. We use the word “master” as a reference to enslavement, to indicate the historical situatedness of color-evasiveness and white supremacy. Allison gave voice to one of these master narratives (and, in our experiences in equity training, one of the most common) when she remarked, “…it’s not always about race.”
In our equity workshops, we find that white faculty are especially practiced at reverting to a “single story” (as writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls it) to avoid their discomfort with race. These master narratives allow faculty to misuse their own experiences as supposed exceptions to racism. Like Allison, white faculty sometimes view their own experiences as proof that racism is not as bad as their BIPOC colleague has illustrated. While claiming to be empathetic, white faculty superimpose their own experiences onto BIPOC stories. Because white faculty do not always understand their experiences as racialized–they too often don’t see the ways their whiteness protects them or at the very least, doesn’t make their lives harder–they are prone to believing that race doesn’t matter. But believing that a BIPOC story “isn’t about race” is a singular, incomplete view of the world that refuses to allow, let alone understand, other stories and experiences.
To practice equitable empathy, white faculty can instead welcome and even seek out multiple narratives. When colleagues like Deja speak up to share their experiences, white faculty like Allison can quiet their immediate reactions, stay with their discomfort, and take time to read and listen to more stories that confront their white biases and the implicit narratives that feed those biases.
In our work with schools and universities, we hear a lot of talk from white faculty about empathy. But in our experience, the way white faculty sometimes practice what they believe to be empathy—by divorcing individual experiences from the context of our racist society, by being too uncomfortable with racialized experiences to acknowledge them, and by superimposing their own color-evasive narratives—impedes the work of antiracism. If equity is going to advance in our universities, white faculty must learn to listen in ways that allow BIPOC stories to be both personal and examples of the racist, caste society in which we all live. Equitable empathy is a necessary practice for creating healthy, antiracist institutions of learning, especially at predominantly white universities like ours.
Dr. Melissa Winchell is associate professor of Secondary Education and Educational Leadership at Bridgewater State University and the Office of Teaching and Learning’s Faculty Fellow for Equity-Minded Pedagogy. Along with McGowan, she is co-founder of EQUITYedu, a Massachusetts-based organization advancing equity in school districts, universities, and organizations.
Dr. Kevin McGowan is associate professor of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Bridgewater State University the former Academic Director of the Martin Richard Institute for Social Justice. Along with Melissa, he is co-founder of EQUITYedu, a Massachusetts-based organization advancing equity in school districts, universities, and organizations.