{"id":42963,"date":"2015-09-28T18:28:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42963"},"modified":"2015-09-28T18:28:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:28:48","slug":"between-the-world-and-me-empathy-is-a-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42963","title":{"rendered":"Between the World and Me: Empathy Is a Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the World and Me: Empathy Is a Privilege<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\n2015-09-28<\/p>\n

John Paul Rollert<\/a><\/strong>, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
\nUniversity of Chicago Booth School of Business<\/em><\/p>\n

Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a> have made race and empathy central to their writing, but their conclusions point in radically different directions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t despair. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a>, that\u2019s what President Obama<\/a> told him at the end of a White House<\/a> meeting in 2013. Coates had criticized the president on his blog for favoring the rhetoric of black self-help over an honest conversation about structural racism. Having written and reflected extensively on race, Obama made it plain to Coates that he took exception to the critique, ending what must have been a tense conversation with his brief words of encouragement. The president reportedly took along Coates\u2019s new book on his recent trip to Martha\u2019s Vineyard<\/a>. If he found time to read it, he knows the younger man didn\u2019t take his advice to heart.<\/p>\n

Obama is not an acknowledged interlocutor of Between the World and Me<\/em><\/a>, but the book may be read as a skeptical reply to the putative power of empathy to transcend racial divisions\u2014a leitmotif of Obama\u2019s two books and a guiding conceit of his presidency. In The Audacity of Hope<\/em><\/a>, the book Obama wrote in 2006 to test enthusiasm for a possible White House run, he describes empathy as both the \u201cheart of my moral code\u201d and a \u201cguidepost for my politics.\u201d Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to \u201cstand in somebody\u2019s else\u2019s shoes and see through their eyes,\u201d Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond \u201cour limited vision.\u201d We unburden ourselves of the trivial rigidities that divide us, allowing us to \u201cfind common ground\u201d even in the face of our sharpest disagreements…<\/p>\n

…Trauma is an irremediable fact of Coates\u2019s work. \u201cI am wounded,\u201d he tells his son. \u201cI am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.\u201d The sentiment hints at another book Coates might have written, one that sees him transcend the crises of his youth for a new understanding in adulthood. That story is more or less the one Obama tells in Dreams of My Father<\/em><\/a>, his first book and, like Coates\u2019s, a lyrical memoir that presents the author\u2019s life as an allegory for race in America. That the two men draw such divergent conclusions\u2014Coates detects a \u201cspecious hope\u201d in the picture of a white cop embracing a black boy after a Ferguson protest<\/a>, whereas Obama considers the interracial harmony of his own family hope at its most audacious\u2014is not merely the consequence of two very different sets of lived experience, but the lessons drawn from them and their implications for empathic transcendence.<\/p>\n

Especially when juxtaposed with Between the World and Me<\/em>, the chapters of Dreams of My Father<\/em> that profile Obama\u2019s adolescence are striking for the studied dispassion that has marked the president\u2019s decisions in office and seems essential to his character. When he describes the racist episodes of his youth, it is not merely that they lack the \u201cvisceral\u201d menace of Coates\u2019s experience\u2014he revealingly calls them a \u201cledger of slights\u201d\u2014they seem only to scratch him, they never scar…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the World and Me: Empathy Is a Privilege The Atlantic 2015-09-28 John Paul Rollert, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science University of Chicago Booth School of Business Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates have made race and empathy central to their writing, but their conclusions point in radically different directions. Don\u2019t despair. According to Ta-Nehisi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,1196,8,20],"tags":[21230,21229,6000,6001],"class_list":["post-42963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-between-the-world-and-me","tag-john-paul-rollert","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-atlantic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42964,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42963\/revisions\/42964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}