Emphasis added in the excerpts
Colbert I. King (right) is an American columnist for the Washington Post and the deputy editor of the Post's editorial page. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. In his OpEd, Maybe this is what Pete Buttigieg was trying to say about empathy ( subscription required — posted today), he began:
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg has taken flak from some African Americans for suggesting that being gay helps him relate to the struggles of African Americans. Buttigieg, his critics say, is appropriating the black experience for his own selfish political agenda.
I’ll let them sort that out. But this I know: Being black causes me to feel empathy with the LGBTQ community and others who are victimized by bigotry.
Two situations cited in a column I wrote on discrimination nearly 30 years ago helped shape my feelings.
“How many white men would choose, of their own accord, that their closest associates in sleeping quarters, at mess, and in a gun’s crew should be of another race? How many would accept such conditions, if required to do so, without resentment and just as a matter of course?”
These were not the musings of a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but the official statement of the chairman of the General Board of the Navy to the secretary of the Navy, Jan. 16, 1942. The subject: “Enlistment of men of colored race in other than messman branch.”
He went on to address discrimination against blacks and members of the LGBT community in the military. In his column from 30 years ago King didn’t address his own empathy. In today’s column he did:
Simply stated, LGBTQ discrimination keeps close company with racism.
So, yes, because I have been and am on the receiving end of racial prejudice, I can relate to others who fall victim to bigotry.
That may explain why I share, in a special way, the revulsion, pain and anger felt by many Jewish community members over the profane and viciously anti-Semitic seven-second Snapchat video recently recorded by two George Washington University students.
And why I recoil at the sight of torch-wielding white nationalists in Charlottesville marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Change one word, and they are railing against me.
Reading his perspective got me to thinking about what it takes to develop empathy. I thought it was unfair and unrealistic for him to suggest that a person has to experience what, as the saying goes, it is like to walk in another person’s shoes to fully grasp what their life experience is like for them.
King was suggesting that Buttigieg was trying to say that being gay helped him have empathy for other groups who were discriminated against. This of course may be true to some extent, however I am not sure Mayor Pete wouldn’t have had empathy even if he wasn’t gay.
Do you have to have lived in a war torn country or an American ghetto to have a deep understanding of what this feels like? Of course you don’t have know from personal experience what this is like.
The world of those lucky enough not to have lived in those conditions and to have grown up safe and secure with realistic hope for their own future is divided between those who have empathy for them, and those, to put it bluntly, those who don’t give a shit.
As a retired psychotherapist who, for the first 20 years of my career, worked at a community mental health center, I worked with people from many backgrounds. My program, the Mason Mental Health Center developed a Vietnam combat vets PTSD program which was the first of its kind in a community mental health center. All but one of our therapists (hired with a V.A. grant) was a combat vet. We worked successfully with dozens of veterans who had experiences which caused our non-veteran therapists (me included) to experience what is technically called vicarious trauma. We needed to have our own self-care debriefings after particularly intense group or individual therapy sessions.
I worked with abused women and needless to say I was not an abused woman. I worked with gay men and I am not gay. I worked with many of what you might call “macho men” and I am definitely not a macho-type.
I think I can understand to some extent the motivation which prompted Colbert King to frame his OpEd about having empathy for Pete Buttigieg from his own experience of being discriminated against as a black man. It maybe a hook for a writer to hang a narrative on but it also may just be how he feels he deviled empathy. Perhaps it is some of each. However, I think King does himself a disservice. I think he would have empathy even if he never experienced discrimination in his own life.
It prompted me to use up all the allowable characters in the Washington Post comments section to write this. Hopefully it explains why I feel this way.
I don't think anyone has to have experienced discrimination to develop empathy. As a white Jewish male from Mt. Vernon, NY which bordered on the Bronx I never experienced discrimination growing up. It was a mixed community north literally of the railroad tracks which split it socio-economically and to some extent racially. There were two high school, a tech school (Edison) which tended to draw those who lived south of the tracks and AB Davis where the majority of students went on to college.
My elementary and jr. high had so many Jewish students teachers didn't bother preparing lessons for Jewish holidays. The first time I felt even a bit of discrimination against me was when I went to Michigan State when some kids in the dorm asked me literally "what are you?"
When I was a kid I wanted to be a commercial artist or cartoonist, then a doctor, and once in college decided to major in psychology and become a therapist.
As a therapist and eventually a clinical supervisor I learned that the sine quo non of having success with your clients was empathy. It mattered not what form of therapy you practiced. Caring about your client and being able to communicate this is what counted. Now we refer to empathy, which is simply another way of saying genuine caring with the word "genuine" added to differentiate it from feigned caring. "Caring" should suffice but varying degrees of less than genuine caring are expressed in our culture so we need the modifier.
Empathy is developed in childhood. Children with abusive parents can "identify with the aggressor" to use a social sciences term, or vow never to be like them and inflict pain, physical or emotional on anyone else. Children with nurturing feeling oriented parents learn empathy from them. Children like myself with one of each learn lessons from both of them. I identified with my mother seeing her pain coping with an emotionally unavailable husband. In vowed never to be like him.
And then I became a therapist.
Related: Donald Trump and 'Identification With the Aggressor'
Recommended reading:
The poll: From reading thousands of comments to my own and other posts on Daily Kos I believe that the typical Kossak has a high level of empathy. Politically I think that the majority of Democrats would rate higher a scale of empathy like this one than the typical Republican. The later group probably has a kind of self-referential empathy, that is, empathy for family and friends and people they identify with but not for people they see as “outsiders” to their own group: migrants, people of color, poor people, etc.
One of the things therapists and medical and other caregivers from are trained to deal with is how to keep from being emotionally overwhelmed by working with people who are suffering. Many medical professionals choose to work with terminal patients and there are therapists who specialize in grief counseling.
But of course you don’t have to be engaged in such work to be challenged by having empathy when there is little or anything you can do to help those who are suffering. Please comment about your experiences and for a rough estimate take the poll.
Saturday, Dec 7, 2019 · 10:26:26 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
With the exception of a few of those who commented everyone wanted to express an opinion about Pete Buttigieg. This makes sense since Kos is by and large a political website. I am still disappointed that just about everyone missed the point of my essay which was about the notion expressed by Colbert King that empathy, at least his own empathy, derived from his experience having been discriminated against since he is black.
King was suggesting that Buttigieg was trying to say that being gay helped him have empathy for other groups who were discriminated against. This of course may be true to some extent, however I am not sure Mayor Pete wouldn’t have had empathy even if he wasn’t gay.
It’s not too late now if anyone wants to talk about empathy in general rather than how it applies to either Colbert King or Pete Buttigieg.
Discuss the difference in empathy between Democrats and Republicans, for example.
Look at the questions on the empathy quotation measurement, or even take it yourself.
I have often written about Trump’s diagnosis and suggested readers look at DMS criteria and tick off those that fit Trump.
Look at the 60 questions on the empathy questionnaire and ask yourself how Trump would answer them if he was totally honest.