“I can’t breathe.” “I’m scared.” For many people, hearing someone say those words would prompt a scramble to help. But not all. It depends on who’s listening.
A year ago Tuesday, the world watched as George Floyd’s life was taken from him in an agonizing 9 1/2-minute video — a murder a police officer was convicted of committing. This month, we saw long-suppressed footage of troopers stunning and punching Ronald Greene as he apologized for leading them on a high-speed chase. He too died.
Millions of us watched those videos. But we didn’t all see the same things, and part of the reason is empathy. On a basic level, how we hear the words of Floyd — and more recently, the words of Greene — depends on our level of empathy.
Testifying about the day Floyd died in Minneapolis, many witnesses wept, still feeling despair at not being able to help him.
“When I cried, the whole world cried,” witness Charles McMillian said recently, describing the powerful testimony he gave in court.
Witness Charles McMillian gets emotional as he begins his testimony in Chauvin’s trial in Floyd’s death.
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But not everyone had the same response. To get a sense of why — and to learn whether America’s relationship with empathy is changing — we spoke to two people who have spent decades studying empathy and bias: Elizabeth Segal, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work, and Jody David Armour, a criminal justice and law professor at the University of Southern California.
How do you define empathy?
Elizabeth Segal: Empathy is a lot more complicated than we would like to think.
I consider the word “empathy” a broad umbrella that includes “interpersonal empathy” and “social empathy.”
Generally, [interpersonal empathy is] the understanding of others from their perspective. In other words, it’s both sharing feelings and understanding what those feelings mean to others … one-on-one or in a very small group.
Social empathy fits more with what’s going on in terms of coming to grips with racism in America and the death of George Floyd. It’s trying to understand what experiences mean to other groups who are different from you and experiences you may never have. That’s social empathy — and it’s much harder.
Let’s get the big question out of the way: Do you see a lack of empathy as one reason racism continues to thrive in the U.S.?
Segal: It’s the lack of social empathy. You have a lot of people who don’t have any experience or insight into people of other races, and that fills a void that often can be filled with stereotypes and displaced anger: “I’m not getting ahead because of them.” It’s the other-ness of people. We have intrinsic tools for empathy, but we have to learn how to be empathic.
Jody David Armour: Absolutely, yes. But we have to carefully define terms, what we mean by racism, because a lot of my work recently and even early in my career was on unconscious bias. You know, something people now like to refer to as implicit bias.
I initially was looking at how at the descriptive level, people unconsciously make harsher judgments about Blacks. But more recently, I came across studies involving brain imaging, that essentially show you your brain — and then here’s your brain on race. It’s a phenomenon called “in-group empathy bias.”
The study was based on the phenomenon that occurs when a person sees someone of the same race drinking water — the observer will simulate what he or she sees, in their mind. They don’t pantomime it, but their brain’s mirror neurons allow them to simulate what they see.
They found a tendency for that to fail when it comes to race. So that if you’re someone, say, white and you’re looking at somebody Black who is drinking a cup of water, your mirror neurons are less likely to fire. So, the basic building blocks of empathy and sympathy aren’t there.
One thing we’ve seen is that more people of different backgrounds are now saying “Black Lives Matter,” the rallying call against violence targeting people of color. Do you also hear it as a call for empathy?
Armour: No question, absolutely. At the heart of the Black Lives Matter mantra is an [implicit] ellipsis that people have chosen willfully to misinterpret. And that ellipsis is: Black Lives Matter, also.
The most natural reading is “Black Lives Matter, too”: Why don’t Black lives get the same kind of consideration, the same kind of care and concern as non-Black lives? That was the real thrust.
You can be willfully obtuse about what [BLM] means and say, “Oh, you’re saying only Black lives matter? No, all lives matter.” There’s a whole group of Blue Lives Matter people — the same people who were criticizing Black Lives Matter. What it meant was, they got it all along.
Considering the past year, do you believe more Americans are now finding empathy within, especially for people of other ethnicities?
Segal: It seems to be the case. To be honest, I’m more optimistic with younger people. Empathy is actually a combination of different brain activities and changing brain behavior.
