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As another Black history month marches on in the U.S., when iconic African-American firsts and important past civil rights victories are ritualistically remembered, analyses of white responses to the starkly different experiences of Black Americans remain muddled, if not neglected.
The idea that white empathy for Black struggles is readily generated by making visible Black suffering in the face of state violence is derived from dominant, mainstream narratives about the civil rights movement that focus on the galvanizing effect on Northern audiences of images of unresisting protesters being beaten, water hosed, etc. during marches in Southern states in the 1960s. But this reading of white responses to Black protest is incomplete and inaccurate. This version of history, for instance, bypasses the angry white mobs that heckled African-American schoolchildren as they tried to integrate Southern schools. In other words, while some whites in the 1960s were moved to support the civil rights movement, others clearly were not. Not only that, but they supported state efforts to resist Black demands for the end of segregation and to forcibly end civil rights activism.
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A similar dynamic is evident today. The damning videos that have shown evidence of police violence, unnecessary escalation, or deadly indifference to Black victims—as in the case of Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner — have elicited a mixed reaction. One could argue that they have galvanized national public opinion to recognize the problem of police violence. Indeed, for many white viewers they have provoked outrage and disbelief. Yet others have literally dismissed the evidence before their eyes. These are the people who have rallied around accused police officers and donated to their defense funds, or who have argued that if Black victims had not resisted, or followed directions, or not broken the law, or not been holding a toy gun in a park, they would not have found themselves in the situations that led to their deaths. The most extreme version of this argument is that police violence against minorities is a fair price to pay in order for whites to feel safe from crime.
"The Racism of the U.S. Criminal Justice System in 10 charts" http://t.co/ibB6fiQHiD
— CommunityRenewalSoc (@CRSchicago) September 22, 2014
The refusal to admit that race played a role in these murders is partly a result of the unwillingness of many white Americans to recognize that key institutions in the U.S., particularly the criminal justice system, are pervaded by institutional racism. This denial of clear evidence of police disregard for Black lives is a symptom of the problem of mistaking empathy for solidarity. To have empathy is to be able to identify with the pain or suffering of others, and in the case of race this is not enough. Solidarity, meanwhile, implies willingness to take action to resolve the injustice, and even being willing to give up unearned privileges as a result. Therefore, the problem is not simply how to generate white empathy, even though that too has historically been difficult, but how to engender white solidarity with Black struggles.
Today, the declining economic opportunities of middle and working class whites renders white empathy even more unlikely. In moments when white privilege is in crisis because white dominance is threatened, white empathy is by and large an elusive, and probably unattainable goal.
In moments when white privilege is in crisis because white dominance is threatened, white empathy is by and large an elusive, and probably unattainable goal.
As recent studies have shown, structural changes in the economy that began to affect African-Americans in the 1970s are now limiting the economic prospects of middle and working class whites. These economic trends have have been accompanied by social dislocations that are manifesting themselves in changes in traditional family roles, surges in drug addiction, spiking white death rates, etc. All of this has led to warnings about a crisis of white working class values reminiscent of arguments that Black poverty is the result of problematic and entrenched behavior patterns in Black communities, such as a culture of government dependency rather than hard work and individual responsibility, etc. Indeed, the fear and rage brought on by declining economic opportunities for middle and working-class whites, which they (wrongly) blame on non-whites, is fueling the appetite for populist, xenophobic, and racist Republican party rhetoric against Latino immigrants, Muslims, and anti-police violence protesters.
According to the legal scholar Derrick Bell, historically, Black gains in the U.S. have come about when they converged with white self-interest. For example, in the case of the 1960s civil rights laws that ended legal racial segregation in the South helped blunt international condemnations of U.S. racism that were quite damaging in the context of the struggle against Communism. In the current moment of economic anxiety it is difficult to see white majorities being able to see Black rights as anything other than special rights that detract from their own prospects because of a zero-sum scenario of declining opportunities and rising inequalities. In such a context, white empathy may prove an elusive unicorn.
The supposedly confrontational and in-your-face tactics of today’s young Black activists have already been successful in placing issues of police violence on the national political agenda and forcing elite universities to grapple with the question of racially hostile campus climates. Yet they have been critiqued by some for squandering support from otherwise sympathetic whites by being “uncivil” or disruptive. This criticism is misguided, not only because it mistakes white empathy with white solidarity, but also because it misreads the racial politics of the current moment. There may be nothing to be lost by such tactics because the elusive white empathy that is supposed to be the goal of Black activism is far out of reach today anyway.
Juliet Hooker is Associate Professor of Government and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity and is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
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