Simulating the Lived Experience of Racism and Islamophobia: On ‘Embodied Empathy’ and Political Tourism

Ngo, Helen

doi:10.1080/13200968.2017.1321090

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The prospect that a well-cultivated capacity for empathy can operate as a technique of white privilege and power intimates the kind of empathy trouble that haunts white feminist thought today. To place the affirmations of empathy as a virtuesuch as we find in Nussbaum (1997), Noddings (2010) and Meyers (2016), among many others -alongside the problematisation of empathy by feminist 'trouble-makers' -such as Pedwell (2014Pedwell ( , 2016, Hemmings (2012), Ngo (2017) and others -reveals the degree to which empathy is a sort of normative 'duck-rabbit' in contemporary Anglophone feminist theory. What appears from one angle to be an anti-racist, humanitarian, ethical and epistemic feminist virtue, from the other looks closer to a white feminist vice par excellence.…”

Section: Empathy Troublementioning

confidence: 88%

The empathiser’s new shoes

2022

Affective Intimacies

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There is a bad smell in here. It wends its way down the length of the carriage, passing over the faces of the patrons of the No. 86 tram in whose company I'm travelling through the heart of my home city of Melbourne on this late autumn afternoon in the year 2019. As we move down Bourke Street, circle past the grand Victorian Parliament House, there is no escaping it. No averted gaze or phone-riveted stare can block the powerful, olfactory truth: here we are bound together in an unpleasant fug. Someone (but who?) has breached the unspoken rule of public transport: do not trespass on another's personal space, and never, but never, get up their nose. Yet, Lord, now here we are, sitting or standing in close confinement; necks craned, heads choreographed in the delicate art of not noticing a thing -what the sociologist Erving Goffman once called the 'civil inattention of modern public space' -some rearing back with a trace of disdain, just so it's clear: 'mistakes were made … but not by me!' At this moment, I'm assuming the collective awkwardness will dissipate as such moments usually do, along with the unedifying air that provoked it. But then, unexpectedly, a woman starts speaking, and I glance over. The first thing that I register is that she is black, an Indigenous woman -in her fifties perhaps. I'm startled by her presence, and then surprised at how taken aback I am at seeing a member of a First Nations people on a tram in the Central Business District. (What is she doing here?) Notwithstanding the decades of avowed multiculturalism in Australia, I actually can't remember the last time I saw an Indigenous person on a tram like this, crammed full with the regular city commuter crowd. On what passes for an average day, the Melbourne metropolis rises up along the Yarra River sparkling like the Lethe, and there are few prompts to sting the white 'quiet majority' into awareness of the original peoples of the land upon which this city was brutally, at times murderously, 'settled'. It is not that I forget this fact, exactly. I neither remember, nor forget. Most days, in much the same way, I neither forget nor remember that I am white. But the unexpected proximity of an Indigenous woman shifts 4

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Section: Empathy Troublementioning

confidence: 88%

The empathiser’s new shoes

2022

Affective Intimacies

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“…There are all sorts of problems that can come up when trying to imagine an experience one hasn't had. For example, people will vary in their skills at imagining experiences they haven't had (Kind 2020), putative information (from sources like testimony, art, and theories) about what the target experience is like can be mistaken or misleading, you may not have had any relevantly similar experiences to compare the target experience with, or you may simply not have access to such information (perhaps due to biases and limitations connected to one's social location, see Kind 2021 andNgo 2017), and so on. In many situations then a person will not be in a position to form a good cognitive model of the relevant experience they have not had, and it may be very difficult for them to improve their abilities to form cognitive models of that experience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transformative experiences and the equivocation objection

Cath

2022

Inquiry

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Paul (2014Paul ( , 2015a argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have a transformative experience by trying to form judgments, in advance, about (i) what it would feel like to have that experience, and (ii) the subjective value of having such an experience. The problem is if you haven't had the experience then you cannot know what it is like, and you need to know what it is like to assess its value. However, in earlier work I argued that 'what it is like'-knowledge comes in degrees, and I briefly suggested that, consequently, some instances of Paul's argument schema might commit a fallacy of equivocation. The aim of this paper is to further explore and strengthen this objection by, first, offering a new argument-the modelling argument-in support of it, and then by evaluating a range of replies that might be given to this objection on Paul's behalf. I conclude that each reply either fails or, at best, only partially succeeds in defending some but not all instances of Paul's argument schema. In closing, I consider how we might revise Paul's concepts of transformative experiences and choices in response to this conclusion.

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“…Centering the privileged perspective Scholars of race Alexis Shotwell (2011) and Helen Ngo (2017) call our attention to those who are on the receiving end of others' empathy and who are harmed by it. They point out that those who engage in efforts to empathize with those who are experiencing racial injustice may inadvertently center their own perspective, rather than really grasp the significant features of others' experiences.…”

Section: Limitations Of Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Empathy Contribute to Intergroup Solidarity? Navigating the Pitfalls of Empathy in the Pursuit of Racial Justice

Gallegos

2024

Hypatia

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This article describes some of the pitfalls of empathy as a tool for supporting intergroup solidarity and examines how best to navigate these pitfalls. In cases where racial injustice is structural and complex, those who are not directly targeted by an injustice may fail to appropriately recognize and respond to injustice, undermining the political solidarity required to make social change. This deficiency in moral knowledge and motivation raises the question of whether relying on empathy in cases of racial injustice could actually be undermining anti-racism. The article describes two ways in which empathy tends to fail as a moral-epistemic tool for recognizing and responding to racial injustice: centering the privileged perspective and generalized projecting. Nevertheless, we should avoid drawing the conclusion that empathy has no place in coalitional politics. This article draws a distinction between transitory empathy, which is experienced as a passing moment in time, and accretionary empathy, which is developed over an extended period of time. The practices associated with transitory empathy are more susceptible to failure, while the practices associated with accretionary empathy can make vital contributions to intergroup solidarity.

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Simulating the Lived Experience of Racism and Islamophobia: On ‘Embodied Empathy’ and Political Tourism

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The empathiser’s new shoes

The empathiser’s new shoes

Transformative experiences and the equivocation objection

Does Empathy Contribute to Intergroup Solidarity? Navigating the Pitfalls of Empathy in the Pursuit of Racial Justice

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