Engaging with the Failures of Racial Empathy

Abstract In the face of media attention that has recently spotlighted police brutality, racialized COVID-19 deaths, and the renewed visibility of white-supremacy groups, scholars, tech entrepreneurs, and media pundits are calling for an increase in empathy, claiming that it may move white and non-Black people of color beyond feelings of pity to dismantling anti-Black racism. However, in the context of anti-Blackness, is racial empathy possible? And what can we expect from it? Examining philosophical critiques of empathy's capabilities by philosophers and scholars engaged in feminist philosophy and Black studies, alongside Heidi Maibom's four-part definition of empathy, I focus on what empathy's limitations might tell us about the emotional and material structures that prevent empathy from achieving the results its advocates often hope for. I argue that the feelings of racial empathy, which may activate in empathy-inducing activities, may instead paradoxically point to the very anti-Black psychological structures that prevent empathetic action. I also contend that the feelings of racial empathy do not themselves undo the relations of anti-Blackness, but tracing the racism implicit in their activation may serve as a self-reflexive tool, an ongoing process, for understanding how anti-Blackness has shaped one's sense of self, embodied awareness, and lifeworld.