SOCIAL EMPATHY IS a skill that is learned. Some of us have learned it without realizing it as we have moved through our lives. Others of us have yet to incorporate social empathy in our worldview. For those new to social empathy, as well as those who want to further develop their skills, there are all sorts of exercises and practices that can be used to enhance one’s social empathy. We would need another book to do justice to all the ways one can learn social empathy. As a small step toward that, I describe a few ways that have worked for me with a simple model I developed as a framework for learning to become socially empathic.1 The framework consists of three levels, and each can build on the one before. The goal is to expose ourselves to new people and situations, learn as much as we can about those people and their lived experiences, and, when possible, take the steps to immerse ourselves in different cultures, situations, and locations.
Three-Tiered Framework for Learning Social Empathy
Level 1: EXPOSURE
Meet new people with the goal of having contact with people who are different from you. Visit new places that reflect cultures that are new and different to you. Think about and discuss ideas and values that are new and different to you.
Level 2: EXPLANATION
Learn about what contributes to the differences between you and others. What happened historically? What is different about your ancestry and the course of history for your ancestors compared to members of other groups? Were there opportunities or barriers in your background that are unique or the same as other groups? How have other groups experienced opportunity? Be sure to research credible data that factually support your understanding of opportunities and barriers.
Level 3: EXPERIENCE
Walk in another’s shoes—imagine yourself in the life of a person who is different from you in class, race, culture, gender, sexual identity, age, national origin, or ability. Try to feel that experience as if it is real for you. Think about what you learned in level 2 that explains why and how the other person’s life may differ from your own or may be similar. What was it like throughout history to be a member of that group? What is it like today? How is the current situation a product of or influenced by history? How would your life today be different if you were a member of that group instead of your own? Search out ways that you can actually experience firsthand these differences over a meaningful period of time.
Teaching Social Empathy on a Small Scale
Getting people to understand how other’s experiences growing up differ from their own can be a challenge. We often refer to different life starting places as differences in privilege. By privilege we mean that some groups have more access to resources and opportunities than do others. These days, the minute we talk about privilege, people become defensive about their upbringing. The recognition that membership in certain groups can place us “ahead” or “behind” others at the start of life is very disturbing. If you tell me that I was born into a group that had a head start in resources and opportunities, then I have to examine where I am today to assess if I got there through my own efforts or if I glided on the efforts of others who came before. If I was born to a group with barriers to accessing resources and privileges, then what lies before me? Am I destined to always be behind? These are very penetrating questions because they ask us to examine what social and economic class means in America. In the United States we pride ourselves on opportunity for all, so any unfairness in the starting place seems un-American. However, the reality is that we do not all start at the same place. Some of us are born to rich parents; some of us to poor parents; some of us in a neighborhood with public parks, libraries, and good schools; and others of us in neighborhoods that are dangerous and lack public parks, libraries, good schools. By framing our view of the start of life through the lens of social empathy, we take a wide-angle look at what some of us had and some of us did not.
There is an exercise I use in my classroom to make this point. To start with, I give everyone a piece of paper with the picture of a ladder on it. The starting place for the exercise is on the middle rung. I ask questions, and depending on the answer, the students move one step up the ladder or one step down the ladder.
Figure E.1 The privilege ladder
The questions include things like “If you grew up in a neighborhood that felt safe and secure, move up one rung,” “If your ancestors were forced to come to this country, move down one rung,” “If you were harassed because of your race or ethnicity, move down one rung,” and “If you have inherited money or property, move up one rung.” You can develop these questions to fit your group. After the questions are asked, the students mark where they ended up on the ladder. Then we discuss what that means. This exercise is based on one that is done physically in a large room with people either taking a step backward or forward.2 I do not do it that way because of my experience watching people’s discomfort moving forward or backward. This is where I used interpersonal empathy to see that the power of visual impressions of people moving to different levels can stereotype people, and it does not protect the privacy of each individual. I prefer to do the exercise on paper in private for each person. The goal is to open the door to a discussion of where we all started off in life and what we had in our childhoods that may have shaped where we are today. It is a beginning for talking about historical and contextual differences in people’s lives.
Visit a Museum
I have found that museums are incredibly powerful places to cultivate empathy. Exhibits use images and real artifacts to tell the stories of people who we can never meet. Our minds and bodies can be viscerally moved to learn about what people have gone through, and at the same time all the components of empathy can be stimulated. In her book Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, sociologist Peggy Levitt explores the roles of museums in our societies and the messages they can share.3 She identifies one of the perspectives shared by many of the museum professionals she interviewed that “museums can and should encourage empathy, curiosity, tolerance, creativity and critical thinking.”4 I applaud this perspective.
When we think about ways to enhance our skills in the components of interpersonal and social empathy, I can attest to the power of museums to indeed do just that. In chapter 2 I shared the power that the exhibit on lynching had to move me to depths of understanding of a historical time and events that shaped the African American experience in the United States. I know that museums are often thought of as stuffy places for eggheads or showcases for colonial thievery of indigenous artifacts, and I will let Dr. Levitt’s book help us to better understand those arguments. Instead, I am going to take a moment to share some of my most moving moments in museums that brought to life the experiences of people of different cultures, races, and time periods in empathic ways.
The horrors of an atomic bomb were made real for me at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima when I saw photos of burned survivors of the atomic bomb dropped there. Spending a few hours in the museum taught me more about the dangers of nuclear war than all that I had read or learned in school or gained from political rallies against nuclear proliferation that I attended. The photographs of American Indian children before and after they were “civilized” by boarding schools that stripped them of every piece of their native lives is a permanent exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix that I take all my visitors to see because it tells a story of oppression that I never learned about in all my years of schooling and explains so much about what it means to be Native American in this country. I have been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, and the images there of people in box cars and concentrations camps, faces that look like those in photographs of my relatives, are empathically seared in my memory. There are other museums that have moved me deeply while teaching me about the lives of others: the Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta, the Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles, the murals painted by Diego Rivera in Mexico City, the Apartheid Museum in South Africa, and many, many more.
I include visits to museums because they offer powerful ways to enlighten ourselves about the lives of others. I am especially drawn to the museums that tell the stories of people who were not included in my history schoolbooks. These museums tend to be small and new and use imagery to tell stories in very moving ways. That is a tool for teaching social empathy. Sometimes we can see exhibits in real time, before they are enshrined in a museum. I recall in 1993 when I saw hundreds of panels of the AIDS Quilt spread across the mall in Washington, DC, each panel telling a personal story captured by friends and family members to remember and celebrate the lives of those who had died from AIDS. It was not designed to teach me details or information, but rather to teach me about the deep sense of loss that was spreading across the nation. It made those who died of AIDS real people, helping to change the face of the disease from one of “gay cancer” to a public epidemic we all should be concerned about. These are some of my stories of engaging empathy through the work of museums and exhibits. I know I am not alone in having those experiences. I applaud the school field trips to those museums and am dismayed that they are first to get cut when school budgets are tight.
Read a Book or Go to a Movie
The suggestion to read a book or go to a movie is simple and obvious. The reason is because it works. I am sure you have many books and movies that helped shape your thinking and gave you a window into the lives of people different from you. The list of books and movies that have given us empathic insight would be very long, and new titles can be added every day. I know how powerful books can be because I have never forgotten what I felt and learned by reading the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. Here is what I wrote almost ten years ago for a piece on personal reflections about privilege:
Liz remembers:
It was only a book, required reading for an English class when I was 14 years old. The book was Black Like Me, the account of John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who darkened his skin and spent 6 weeks traveling through the South as an African American man. Reading that book had the most profound impact on me then, and has stayed etched in my memory for almost 40 years. It was the first time I remember feeling outrage at social injustice because I really felt the agony and fear of hatred and discrimination as if I were there with the author. For the first time that I can recall, I simultaneously felt what another person was feeling and understood the social injustice that was a consequence of the privilege I had, the privilege of being white.
I grew up in middle class America in an almost all white world of home, school, synagogue, and summer camp. My family was active in the Civil Rights movement, I even heard Martin Luther King speak twice, including his famous speech on the Mall in Washington, DC in August of 1963. But until I read Black Like Me, I don’t think I got it, that I understood racism and white privilege. I have no recollection of any class discussion, activities, or writing that might have gone with the reading assignment. But I do remember vividly the book and its effect on me.5
Any book or movie that can leave an indelible mark on our lives for decades is an extremely powerful way to teach us to be socially empathic.
Teaching Social Empathy Writ Large
Storytelling and witnessing are effective ways to share our experiences and hear what others have to say. It can be incredibly powerful when done on a large scale to address injustices. It also needs to be done with sensitivity because telling one’s story can also open up old wounds and have the effect of retraumatizing people. For those reasons, great care should be taken when organizing public storytelling or witnessing.
Hearing firsthand from perpetrators and victims not only allows people to have their voices heard, but can also open dialogue and exchange of what it was like to have been on the other side. One of the most potent public efforts to witness and address large-scale actions of social injustice has been truth and reconciliation commissions. There are guidelines from organizations and from those commissions that have been successful in creating a process to allow victims and perpetrators to effectively share their stories.6 Although now closed, the first truth and reconciliation process held in the United States took place in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1979, five anti-Klan demonstrators were killed by Klan members who claimed self-defense. The court cases that followed did not help to give a sense of justice to the community, nor was a full investigation of the event conducted. Community members organized the commission and held hearings in 2005 with a final report released in 2006. It is an incredibly inspiring example of how a community transformed the consequences of a painful and unjust event into an opportunity for public expression and reconciliation. The commission members are very candid about what worked and what did not, so their experience can be replicated by other communities. The executive summary of the report can be found at http://www.greensborotrc.org/exec_summary.pdf.
Witnessing and storytelling can also be powerful tools in making people’s experiences known to those in power and in positions to influence public policy making. There is a great deal of information on how to testify before elected officials and how to get people’s stories heard by those in power. One of the most recent resources is from a group of former congressional staffers who developed the Indivisible Guide, available at https://www.indivisibleguide.com.
These are just a handful of actions that can be used to build exposure, explanation, and experience to the lived realities of others. As a result of taking those steps, we become better practitioners of social empathy. If you would like more information on social empathy and how we might build a more socially empathic world, please visit the Social Empathy Center at http://www.socialempathy.org.
