"Objects Insignificant to Sight": Racial Violence and Empathy in Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black"

Abstract

An effort to lay bare the root causes of the empathy deficiency that enables the brutal practice of lynching lies at the very center of William Faulkner’s short masterpiece “Pantaloon in Black.” First published in 1940 as a chapter in the novel Go Down, Moses, “Pantaloon in Black” confronts the underlying psychological and social forces that legitimize lynching by humanizing its central African American character, Rider. Recent discoveries in neuroscience and social psychology concerning empathy can provide a useful vantage point for understanding Faulkner’s critique of racist violence in “Pantaloon in Black” and in Go Down, Moses more generally. The preponderance of evidence from these fields demonstrates that our emotional responses to the pain of others are hardwired into our brains and frequently felt with an involuntary immediacy over which we have little control. Feeling with others is a spontaneous, natural feature of our common humanity, a biological inheritance most likely developed as an adaptive trait in the process of human evolution. However, if our empathic responses to others are indeed a common biological inheritance, then how do we explain the apparent suspension of such responses in the inflicting of racist violence? In his research into empathic accuracy, William Ickes notes how negative frames of reference that “become inflexible, unyielding, and irrecon-