Very interesting thinking about how we’ve arrived at this uncaring, un-empathetic time influenced heavily by what is now practiced as an uncaring, un-empathetic religious movement. Responding with caring and empathy only reinforces the damage.
White progressives thus face the same empathy trap today that they did during the Civil Rights era: without understanding that empathy includes prophetic resistance to harm, the liberal Protestant adage supposedly coined by John Watson to “be kind, for every person you meet is fighting a hard battle” becomes the perfect nihilistic ammunition to destroy all ethical responsibility at the altar of political expediency.
This paradoxically means that the costliest political behavior required of white Protestants right now is to disavow the desire to be seen by others as empathetic. While empathy remains a powerful tool, it becomes nothing more than justification for white civility if it is not used as spiritual fuel for protecting one’s vulnerable neighbors. To relinquish solidarity with oppressed Black, Brown, and Indigenous people because of bad-faith political accusations of incivility would be the true end of empathy.
[from Los Angeles Review of Books]
