Learning, Doing, Teaching, Being

Some time ago, Snap Judgment, one of my favorite NPR programs, had a show about Daryl Davis who befriended a few KKK Grand Wizards.  Through simply trying to understand how they could hate him before they knew him as an individual, he managed to convince at least three to give up their robes.

I admire this.

Recently, I saw a TEDx talk by Ash Beckham whose message was that your hard isn't any harder than anyone else's hard. Your hard may be disclosing that you are gay, or being an undocumented immigrant, or fearing hordes undocumented gay immigrants moving into your neighborhood.  But, as she says, there is no harder.  There is just hard.

I admire this.

And even today, I happened upon an RSA video of Brene Brown brilliantly explaining the difference between sympathy and empathy.  Sympathy acknowledges, but also disconnects one from others. Empathy requires connecting with the feelings of the other.

I admire this as well.

I also read an article about Mandela written upon the event of his death.  The author recounted the story of Mandela looking after and keeping clean a fellow prisoner suffering from a stomach illness. The message in the article is that it is insufficient to remember. What is demanded of all of us is to act to facilitate social justice and honor the dignity of other human beings.  And, of course, to forgive.

This I admire and want to emulate.

And as someone who teaches and works at the intersection of social relations, community development, law and policy, and public health, I encourage engaging in respectful discourse that allows empathy to develop.   I read about it, especially in relation to race/ ethnicity, gender, and class. I write about it.  I participate in lots of activities that demand facilitating this exact thing.  I do research that requires that I put myself in a non-judgmental position (and I am pretty good at this). And, as a college professor, I teach it at every level and every opportunity.

And yet, openness, empathy, and forgiveness are difficult to practice outside of my "work."  I can listen to a participant in one of my studies talk about how a specific group that I belong to are "the problem" in society. I can analyze this and relate it to a variety of theories that situate such reactions in ethnocentrism, political manipulation, mass media hysteria or some combination therein. And I can even encourage everyone I work with to remember that "those people" are human beings and not caricatures of false consciousness.  But I cannot handle intolerance outside of this.

So, there is this woman in my neighborhood.  And she just says the most gawd-awful things, mostly about Latino immigrants.  It doesn't take a whole lot of training in the subtle code language of xenophobia or regular reading in social theories of othering to see her behavior, especially online, as too closely aligned with folks who have landed in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence files. 

And I know from my own training, ongoing engagement with development in social theory, and field research that her behavior is likely the result of fear and loss.  Fear of people who she doesn't know or understand. Loss of standing in a community that has changed before her eyes.  Fear of change, generally.  Loss of a community that she once knew and that is not so slowly fading into the past.

But, to be frank, I can not let her behavior go unchallenged.  She may very well be a nice person otherwise, but her statements and behavior in certain spaces are simply unacceptable  While I can understand why she may act the way she does, I do not empathize with it.

I think this is the case because I associate these fears and this sense of loss with an undeserved sense of entitlement.  I cannot give quarter to someone who wants to tell me, or people like me, whether I am entitled to be actively involved in this place that I have chosen to call my home.  This is my community and you cannot tell me otherwise.

And so, I continue to work on  promoting discourse, understanding, empathy, and forgiveness.  But I do not confuse understanding with acceptance.  I cannot tolerate intolerance, even when I understand where it is coming from.  I believe that people should held accountable for their actions, especially with the words they use in social media. But I do hope that someone in this neighborhood is able to continue to engage in meaningful dialogue with this woman, at least for her sake. At this stage in my life, I cannot.