Whiteness and Cosplaying Empathy
15 x $5 Week 3: Tammy Triolo
For my explanation of the 15 x $5 initiative started by Kokayi Nosakhere, go here.
Watch: Cosplaying empathy
Content Warning: discussion of lynching, sexual assault
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…too many of them [white people] are doing this work from the most intellectual place. It’s here [gestures to head] not here [gestures to heart]. And the reason why I say that white people that are doing a lot of antiracism work are doing it from an intellectual place and cosplaying empathy, it’s because inside of whiteness, empathy is a liability.
…
When I see photos of lynchings, beyond the horror of seeing a body hanging from a tree, I’m looking at the white faces in those photos. And what I know is happening is the psychological conditioning of white people to erase from their humanity empathy, to feel sorry for the Black body hanging in the tree. Because if they felt sorry for the Black body hanging in the tree, that violence would visit them too. So a lot of white people don’t have empathy - so they cosplay it.
Watch: Nice does not equal empathy
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“If you’re not paying attention, niceness in white culture masquerades as empathy. But the thing is, niceness is not real, it’s very fake, there’s nothing authentic about it, there’s nothing genuine about it. And so a lot of times white folks will confuse white people’s niceness for empathy and it’s not.”
Watch: We can learn to empathize
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…stop pretending you feel something you don’t feel. When you are pretending to feel something, you stop the ability to interrogate why you don’t feel anything for this person, why you don’t feel anything for this sadness, this harm that’s happened to somebody else. And the reason why people don’t stop to interrogate that [is] because once they sit with the feeling of ‘I don’t feel anything,’ what results is societal shame, because we are conditioned in a society to say the right things - to pretend to feel the right things, even if we don’t feel them.
And part of learning how to have empathy is to stop the habit or behavior of pretending that you do.
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