Radical Empathy
Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.
– Isabel Wilkerson, Caste
This idea of “radical empathy,” which Isabel Wilkerson writes about at the end of her book Caste, has been pinging around in my mind lately. Radical empathy is not sympathy, or feeling sad on someone’s behalf. It is not pity, feeling bad for them from a superior position. It’s not empathy, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It is understanding how someone else feels from their perspective, not your own.
The natural impulse when trying to understand someone else is to put yourself in their situation. That is a good place to start, because it involves shifting our own perspectives to learn about someone else’s situation and its context, but even then, we tend to naturally imagine how we would feel in that situation, rather than what that person feels in it. We bring our own particular brands of privilege and woundedness, our own personality tendencies, our own areas of discernment and blind spots, into that situation. The other person brings theirs. Their felt experience will be different than ours.
The more privileged I am in an area, or the more potent my particular combination of privileges, the harder it is to practice radical empathy. This applies to privileges I may be more aware of possessing, or not aware of possessing at all: being born in a particular century, into a particular family, with a particular height or skin color or body structure. It may be the privilege of education, or travel, or health. It may be the privilege of having personality strengths that play well into Western culture, of being a particular age, of having a particular set of experiences, of lacking certain kinds of trauma, of having certain levels of economic, societal, or emotional stability and security.
In some ways, we tend to be surrounded by people who match our privilege profile, either through external tendencies or personal preferences. And so it becomes that much harder to see our own privilege, that much easier to take them for granted. It becomes easier to think that we deserve them, and the more we do that, the more we struggle with judging others.
The point is not to compare privileges, or feel guilty for what privileges we have. The point is to see that, if we really want to love others, we have to acknowledge or even shed some of the privileges we carry. Radical empathy is a reminder that even when we think we’re being empathetic, we may be inserting more of ourselves than we think. It’s a reminder that we may not be able to ever fully understand what it’s like for someone else, but that being willing to shed our own assumptions, to listen with humility, is a start. Radical empathy leads us away from jumping to conclusions or opinions about what someone else should or could have done in the situation.
“Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.”
When it comes down to it, radical empathy is hard because it means I have to step into some kind of suffering that isn’t my own, something that is inconvenient, or resource-consuming, or just uncomfortable. It’s easier to stay in my own bubble, in the ease of my own ignorance or preferences. But that is not what it means to follow Jesus. It hardly needs to be said that Jesus practiced the most radical degree of empathy one can imagine: he left privileges we cannot imagine, he left heaven, to enter this earth and walk in a human body. He laid himself aside to experience life as we do. There is not one form of suffering that he does not understand (Hebrews 4:15). He did it because he loves us. And that is exactly how we should love others.
There’s a kind of heaviness and beauty wrapped into all of this. The more I understand what it means to have radical empathy for my children, for my closest friends, for someone who may be quite different from me, the more I see how ensconced I tend to be in my own self-centered judgment and selfishness. That’s heavy to deal with. Understanding others’ experiences and bearing some of it with them is heavy to deal with. But there is also a kind of beauty that is revealed, an experience of connection, love, perspective, that I wouldn’t have necessarily experienced or even known to value on my own.
