What was it like to be George Floyd? In a textured October 16th The Washington Post podcast, a team of journalists wove a historically relevant, riveting, and compassionate narrative. Nothing of Floyd’s struggles with addiction or his softer side was secret, but neither is the character assassination that can come with caricatures or political posturing. Dedicated, long-form journalism can disentangle these threads, and such dexterity was on full display in the Post’s storytelling. Successfully conveyed was the desperation of a man who had recently lost his mother, his last hope for salvation and the name he spoke as he gasped for his final breath.
We can never know what it was like to be George Floyd, but the reward for trying is that we cultivate our humanity. There is evidence that we also build a stronger public good. At educational institutions across the country, we teach the skills employers want: communication, critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork. Because we are inheritors of the Enlightenment, we tend to privilege the Cartesian ideal of “I think, therefore I am,” which we can find on college and university websites across the country: ideas, thought, inquiry. What we tend not to find is the word empathy, and yet this year we have learned more about the importance of a greater compassion — individually and collectively. Empathy can be taught because it is a habit of mind, similar to math or chemistry, making it an important analytical, or critical, endeavor. The journalists at The Washington Post were engaging not only in inquiry and research, but in critical empathy.
Three additional examples of critical empathy illustrate how we might recognize it. They bring us into close and intimate relationships with Black women, men and masculinity, and people in far-away places, temporally and spatially. Each example shows that particular critical crafts, like journalism, can deepen our empathy, which is part of how we come to deeper understanding.
The Visual Arts and Performing Arts
The first example comes from the visual arts. I recently spent some time on the website of Detroit artist Sabrina Nelson because she will be part of the upcoming Webinar series this spring in the University of Richmond School of Arts & Sciences, where I serve as dean. Her current work drew me into a web of associations relevant to her medium of choice. Her beleaguered and beautiful city and her identity as a Black woman buttress her art. “Why You Wanna Fly Blackbird” asks us what it might feel like to be an African American mother during these times. The work is evocative of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Captivity and efforts to break free from it are particular symbols from the very foundations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The myths of Africans flying home frame Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon. Imprisonment is profoundly personal and local (in 2018, 33% of the prison population in the United States was Black), but it is also a common reality during a year when everyone surely feels some degree of isolation and confinement. Nelson demonstrates how important it is to understand particulars before moving toward generalization — or the universal. The visual arts can help us do that.
Literature
The novelist Nicole Krauss gives us a second example of critical empathy, from literature. In an interview with The Guardian, Krauss is asked why she wrote To Be a Man. Her response brings the reader into “her own experiences with men,” which include being “the mother of two boys and what it means to raise those boys into men in the context of this moment where the idea of manhood is so beleaguered and problematic and complex.” Krauss’s subject matter and her ideas raise the age-old question of whether a writer can truly inhabit the humanity of another. Whether or not we can, we are lost if we give up trying. In 2020, America is a divided country, and much of the chasm between us involves matters of identity and experience. Rather than dismiss whole swaths of people, there is reward in attempting to understand their position. Krauss reminds us that literature can help us do so.
