Here is the full transcript of author and scholar Chezare A. Warren’s talk titled “The Difference Between False Empathy and True Support” at TED 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Has anybody else been wearing glasses your entire life? OK. And if not you, perhaps you know someone who has. Like, I cannot remember a time when I did not have these things, right?
Exhibit A. And then — ain’t he cute? And then I remember turning 25 many moons ago, and I had this fabulous birthday party being planned, right? Chicago, penthouse on a lake.
It was going to be gorgeous. And this is from that photo shoot. You had to have a photo shoot. So I ordered these contacts because, you know, I’m going without glasses, but the contacts never come.
So I show up to the party, no contacts, no glasses. I can’t see a doggone thing. A for effort, but it was definitely a failed mission. Nonetheless, here I am in my 40s with my stylish but indispensable Coke bottles, helping me to see clearly so that I’m not a danger to myself or anybody else.
Empathy
Beyond wanting to share a picture of me as an adorable child or reminisce on my youth gone by, all this talk about seeing reminds me of a very widely known but misunderstood concept: empathy. See, I’ve been studying empathy for the last 15 years. And at its core, empathy is how we see plus what we see.
How we see is rooted in our personal experience. It’s subjective. What we see is more objective. It is a physical observation of a moment, a circumstance, a condition that invites us to act in some particular way.
How we see, on the contrary, is more rooted in our personal beliefs and our value system, and perhaps our technical knowledge, all of which may vary from person to person.
I’ve learned over the years that earnest attempts at doing empathy the right way can still land us in the wrong place.
The Political is Personal
While working on my PhD, I was a full-time eighth grade math teacher on the South Side of Chicago. So I would teach all day, I would go to class and I would study all night. Zero out of ten, do not recommend.
I was always tired. Anyway, I remember my first semester of graduate school taking a class and reading a paper called “The Political is Personal” by Eileen O’Brien. In the paper, O’Brien describes white anti-racists who have a really difficult time building relationships with the people of color that they aim to help.
O’Brien insists that white folks and people of color in the United States are separated by this wide perception gap. So white folks sort of think about racism as ending in 1960s and therefore see people of color as complaining and overreacting. But people of color see continued racial discrimination.
O’Brien is helping the reader to notice a fundamental divergence in perspective that she describes as false empathy, borrowing from heralded legal scholar Richard Delgado. Essentially, false empathy is the failure of the empathizer to see eye-to-eye with the individual for whom they aim to empathize.
False Empathy in Education
These white anti-racists really thought of themselves as more empathetic than they really were. In fact, the people of color they aimed to help did not receive their benevolence and charity as help at all. And in turn, these white anti-racists developed feelings of discontent and frustration that O’Brien then describes as evidence of their false empathy.
Now, I remember reading that paper and thinking a lot about my white colleagues who I taught with at the time in Chicago. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, white folks make up about 80 percent of the teacher workforce, while US student populations become increasingly diverse. Less than 50 percent of all K-12 students are being identified as white.
This really made me wonder if empathy, or perhaps false empathy, could explain why my colleagues had such a difficult time building positive, substantive relationships with their Black students. I watched as Black boys, who needed more patience and more care, be mislabeled as disengaged and disinterested learners.
Now a young person who refuses to take off their headphones, that’s what we see. Making sense of the reasons why is how we see. We need both to drive what we do, because empathy is best expressed in the doing.
Examples of False Empathy
Like the white anti-racist in the O’Brien study, these teachers’ relationships tended to be fragile at best, and too often nonexistent with a group of kids who desperately needed positive adult interactions. Now, I’m talking about education. But all of us, no matter what your industry, on a quest to become a good and kind human being, must stop to notice if false empathy is driving our interactions with diverse others.
OK, so I have to give you a few examples. False empathy is thinking you know more about other people’s problems than they do. It’s like meeting somebody from Flint, Michigan and saying, “Oh my God, I know what it’s like not to have something you need” when you’ve never been without clean water.
Not having something you need is not exactly the same thing as not having clean water. False empathy is like putting on your superhero cape. We see somebody in pain, we rush into action, shrouded in the spectacle of it all, without ever stopping to query the source of their distress.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but sometimes saving them may be more about you than it is about them. And false empathy is egotistical. It is self-centered.
Avoiding False Empathy
I love crab legs. Can I just be honest? I love seafood. But false empathy is thinking I’m doing a really good thing by going to my favorite restaurant and getting a pound of juicy crab legs to take to a partner who has a shellfish allergy.
Or buying an expensive gift for a child who would much rather have your attention on the couch after a long day. I could go on, but what I’m trying to say is that false empathy represents a conflict in perspective, and an earnest intention at anti-racism and helping others does not guarantee that your action will lead to the intended outcome, or that we will achieve the relationships that we all need to thrive.
I’ve learned in my research with teachers who demonstrate evidence of empathy with Black boys that they don’t wake up every day aiming to be empathetic. They try things, they fail, and they make mistakes. They exercise humility and they try something else.
Some researchers might refer to that as perspective taking, which is the ability to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others. So we know that perspective taking substantially improves student-teacher relationships. That Black boys, who are otherwise cast aside, feel seen and heard in classrooms where there is evidence of perspective taking, in part because their teachers take a lot of care to develop innovative and proactive solutions to their problems.
We know that perspective taking can reduce instances of exclusionary discipline, which is an issue that is particularly salient for Black kids. And we know that empathy training can reduce implicit bias. So imagine for a second you come across someone who appears to be sad and you want to offer them some support, or you have a friend who approaches you for advice on an issue for which you have some familiarity.
If you want to avoid false empathy, perhaps you start by stopping. Stop to observe the moment, right? Empathy requires heightened sensitivity to our ego. We all have an ego.
We just don’t want that ego over determining how we see. So we have to learn to decenter ourselves as we listen. Listening is an art.
It’s a discipline, but it’s also an act of perspective taking. We listen so that we can ask meaningful questions, engage in discourse, exercise humility and simply be present. We cannot do empathy without perspective taking.
And finally, we have to do something. We have to act. But we should not expect that just because we acted that it’s going to be the right thing.
The feedback we get from that action should drive our subsequent interactions. On the journey to understanding and interpretation, it’s a lot like our natural eyes. It grows with time.
Conclusion
As I grow older, my eyes evolve. That’s what we’ll call it. They evolve.
And so I have to go, and I have to see the optometrist, and I sit in front of that contraption as they move the different lenses to check the clarity of my sight. They’re doing that because they want to make sure that how and what I see helps me to act in a way that will make the world a better place as I move through it. Empathy is a lot like that prescription.
So the next time you want to help, you want to heal, you want to support or simply show up for someone, try to make sure you’re seeing with the right eyes. Thank you.