IN COLLEGE IN the early aughts, I was part of a group called Students Educating and Empowering for Diversity (SEED). We were trained to facilitate workshops around race, class, gender, and sexuality on campus. Recognizing biases, cross-cultural communication, that sort of thing. There wasn’t a huge demand for our services. I grew disillusioned with some of the buzzwords preached back then – “tolerance,” “cultural competency.” Weren’t we after more than being tolerated? Was tolerance all we could hope for? Why aim for competence when there could be excellence?
Over the next 20 years and especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, more formal structures than a bunch of idealistic peer facilitators have been put in place across academia and the workplace. And as the goals for this work and corresponding rhetoric have grown more ambitious, they have attracted the ire of conservatives following the “critical race theory” playbook we discussed in Literary Citizen last month. In Florida, Governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has vowed to eliminate funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education; Texas Governor Greg Abbott has followed suit with a declaration of his own. Laura Ingraham runs segments on her Fox News show characterizing DEI initiatives as scams promoting “bureaucracy, victimology, incompetence.” And in 2020, under the jurisdiction of the previous Administration, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the city of Seattle for conducting voluntary racial equity trainings that incorporated race-based caucusing – tailored sessions for people who identify as white or as people of color. The case was dismissed in 2021 as politically motivated and without merit.
Opinions on the need to have conversations about structural biases and internalized racism depend on whether someone believes those things exist - and whose problem they are to solve.
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Literature demands writers imagine the lives and motivations of characters unlike ourselves. And in contemporary literary fiction, we are unsatisfied with what are called flat characters – those who are one-note. We write our heroes with flaws, our villains with redeeming qualities. We puzzle out the reasons our characters do the things they do and why things matter to them. Complicated characters make for emotional complexity, higher stakes, better stories. Writing sometimes feels like an exercise in radical empathy – a topic we might encounter in one of Seattle’s racial justice trainings or any number of DEI initiatives.
Radical empathy, as defined by Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, is not sympathy or pity. It is “not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.”
Political scientist Terri Givens notes radical empathy encourages us to “not only understand the feelings of others, but to be motivated to create… change.”
To me, nowhere in literature is more radical empathy required than in writing a persona poem.
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A persona poem is, in effect, a dramatic monologue. The poet gives over the speaking voice to a character. But the writer is still there, off-stage but in the room, as the creator of the character and, perhaps, the holder of an agenda. Take three and a half minutes to watch Patricia Smith perform her 1992 poem “Skinhead” on Def Poetry Jam. (Do it! Seriously!) Through her first-person embodiment of a skinhead, her purpose as the poet, and as a Black woman, comes through: to say I see you, and not only you, but the America who allowed you to become the person you are.
Here is Kevin Young’s poem “Reward:”
RUN AWAY from this sub- scriber for the second time are TWO NEGROES, viz. SMART, an outlandish dark fellow with his country marks on his temples and bearing the remarkable brand of my name on his left breast, last seen wearing an old ragged negro cloth shirt and breeches made of fearnought; also DIDO, a likely young wench of a yellow cast, born in cherrytime in this parish, wearing a mixed coloured coat with a bundle of clothes, mostly blue, under her one good arm. Both speak tolerable plain English and may insist on being called Cuffee and Khasa respect- ively. Whoever shall deliver the said goods to the gaoler in Baton Rouge, or to the Sugar House in the parish, shall receive all reasonable charges plus a genteel reward besides what the law allows. In the mean time all persons are strictly forbid harbouring them, on pain of being prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law. Ten guineas will be paid to anyone who can give intelligence of their being harboured, employed, or enter- tained by a white person upon his sentence; five on conviction of a black. All Masters of vessels are warned against carrying them out of state, as they may claim to be free. If any of the above Negroes return of their own accord, they may still be for- given by ELIZABETH YOUNG.
Here the speaker is revealed as one Elizabeth Young, slaveholder, placer of a newspaper ad. Kevin Young doesn’t attempt to embody this speaker in direct first person. We don’t have access to her inner thoughts, only what she’s chosen to broadcast in a newspaper. The structure holds the reader at a distance but still manages to communicate her indignancy, callousness, and sense of superiority. Somehow the poem’s horror is intensified by being crafted as a “normal” newspaper ad, as if one were selling a car. Our fear for Cuffee and Khasa is also intensified because we know they’re being hunted, as well as the stakes if they are caught. And because we’re not in Cuffee or Khasa’s point of view, we understand them not as they see themselves but as a slaveowner sees them, which serves to deepens our empathy – for them, if not for the speaker of the poem.
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Among the chief tactics of the culture wars is the performance of apathy. If empathy recognizes others, apathy is the lack of concern. The governors seeking to politicize DEI initiatives for political gain have access to the same information as everyone else. A recent GAO report confirmed that women, and especially Black and Latina women, earn significantly less than male counterparts performing the same kinds of work across all levels of education. When it comes to higher ed, there’s a significant racial gap in attaining a bachelor’s degree, which contributes to a similar gap in social and economic mobility. Apathetic politics say this doesn’t matter, it isn’t a problem, it doesn’t affect me, I see no role here for the public sector or civic leaders, where are those bootstraps.
DEI initiatives aren’t meant to make individuals feel better or worse about their identities. In the workplace they’re meant to address entrenched systems that perpetuate discriminatory hiring practices, lack of transparency, and toxic environments that lead to pay inequity and high turnover. In higher ed, DEI initiatives are meant to create environments that promote growth and success for all students. I spent a lot of time as a low-income student of color alone, frustrated, failing classes, feeling an outsized responsibility to call attention to structural problems like the lack of faculty, students, and speakers of diverse backgrounds. It makes sense to ask how we got here and how we might collectively rise to the challenge of creating change. And part of the answer may be in practicing radical empathy. As Patricia Smith told Saeed Jones about her experience writing and performing “Skinhead”: “It’s a weird thing when you open your body to somebody else's story.”
It’s fine, too, to acknowledge radical empathy’s limits. In the act of acknowledging that some things are unimaginable lives a sense of shared humanity. I cannot fully understand you, you cannot fully understand me, but here we are, seeing each other as best we can. I’ll leave you with the poet Camille Rankine as she considers how to again elevate our goals:
“When I learn about a life that’s vastly different from my own, whose challenges are alien to me, whose sorrows I’ve never weathered, what strikes me is that I cannot imagine. I try to conjure their reality and my imagination fails. I reach toward a sense of comprehension, but I cannot fully arrive at it. I cannot contain this knowledge because it isn’t mine to hold. What I come to understand is that I will never know what it’s like, not really. What I feel is not what the other feels—what I feel is the gulf between what I know and what they know. It can be a devastating chasm of a feeling. What if, instead of empathy, it is this sort of understanding that we seek? What if, instead of attempting to step into the place of an other, I step to face them, feeling the distance that separates their life from mine, ready to heed the words they offer into the space between us?”