The Power and Perils of Empathy

on drained pools and a sofa full of holes

Jan 20, 2023

This week on the MLK holiday I attended a lecture by Heather McGhee, chair of the organization Color of Change and author of the wonderful The Sum of Us, which was the topic of her talk.

The central narrative metaphor in The Sum of Us is the two thousand lavish public swimming pools that were built in the 1930s and ’40s, only to be closed down, drained and filled with concrete when the courts began to integrate them in the ’50s and ’60s. McGhee coined the phrase “drained-pool politics” as a way of describing this self-sabotaging phenomenon of going without some public or civic benefit if it means “undeserving” others will also have it.

McGhee shared a bracing statistic: according to the ANES poll in 1956, a two-thirds majority of white Americans believed the government ought to make sure all Americans had a job that provided a minimum standard of living. Those numbers stayed the same in 1960, but in four short years, that number had plummeted to 35%. What had changed by 1964? McGhee argues it was the rise of civil rights, and the realization among white America that “all Americans” would have to include Black folks as well.

Obviously, drained-pool politics is inflected by race, but at its core is a zero-sum mentality: in order for one person or group to win, someone else must lose. Until we address that zero-sum mentality, McGhee argues, we will never achieve true justice and opportunity for all. The antidote to zero-sum is what she calls the “solidarity dividend”--the idea that when we work together across racial and cultural lines, we all benefit.

During the Q&A following the lecture, a Black man asked McGhee how she kept from being angry and demoralized by a politics in which a not-insignificant number of white people would rather shutter their swimming pools than welcome Black people into them. McGhee responded that on the contrary, she did feel angry from time to time. And yet, she continued, if we want to be effective–if we want to help create Dr. King’s image of the beloved community–we need to be strategic. And we need to be clear-eyed about the various forces in our politics peddling a zero-sum mentality for their own cynical gain–and recognize that those voices are very persuasive. “Everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told,” she said. “Does a teacher get angry with her students because they don’t know how to spell yet? It’s our job to lift up an alternate story.”

But in order to tell a better story in a way that people hear, she said, we need to practice radical empathy–a sincere desire to understand where someone is coming from. For McGhee, empathy helps us be more effective in our persuasion, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. Her book and recent podcast tell many of these hopeful stories.

The world at large feels pretty low on empathy these days. It’s like we’re locked in an arms race, stalemated into a posture of mutually assured destruction: “I’ll empathize with you, but only if you empathize with me first.” I know empathy is the way, and still I find myself with hackles up, refusing to do the work. Why would I seek to understand someone whose conclusions I deplore? I have no desire to trace the twists and turns that would lead someone to see my queer kids as dangerous or defective, for example.

But sacrificial love doesn’t work that way. Of course we need to keep good boundaries; it’s faithful to want to minimize the harm others can do. I don’t have to endorse someone’s conclusions in order to discover on a deep level why they think and feel as they do, and maybe, maybe see our common humanity and find some shared values. As McGhee reminds us, empathy is strategic. I left her talk wondering how I could be more curious and open-hearted with people whom I find hard to love.

Recently I’ve been diving into some deeper coursework around design thinking, which has empathy as a starting point. I was captivated by a story about an organization that worked with autistic individuals and had formed a task group to design better solutions for serving them. One woman visited with a client who spent their session picking at a leather sofa, ripping up paper, and rubbing his head against the wall so repetitively that the wall had started to wear away over time. She found herself recoiling at his destructive tendencies and wondering how the task group might curb the behavior. During the next visit, she decided to lean into empathy by mirroring the behavior she saw: pulling at the sofa, tearing up old magazines. To her astonishment, she experienced the unexpected sensory delights of these activities, not unlike popping bubble wrap. When putting her head against the wall, she realized the wall carried vibrations that were interesting and pleasurable.

The first visit, she had brought her own frame of reference with her. The second time, she was able to empathize, and that strategic shift helped lead to better solutions for her clients. Blessed be.

Where do you need to lean into empathy? I would love to hear.

The Blue Room with MaryAnn McKibben Dana

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