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Empathy Is the Answer To Fighting COVID and Racism
Selfishness brought us to where we are. Here’s how to start to reverse it.
The shared experience of the global Covid-19 pandemic has led some to call the virus a “great equalizer.” But this is only true to the extent that we recognize its role in both revealing and exacerbating the problem of inequality plus the much less visible (or perhaps more visible) issue of American dehumanization.
Global protests followed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and Elijah McClain, yet nothing happened to change the issue of White-on-Black police attacks. (The most recent is Jacob Blake, whose brutal shooting sparked massive unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, although Blake survived the assault, suffering paralysis rather than death.) Yet no lessons seem to have been learned about how to stop the killings, protests, and violence.
But I want to offer a humble possible solution as a first step: empathy.
Such empathy is exemplified in Portland, Oregon’s Wall of Moms, the unified group of White mothers linking arms, forming a barrier protecting Black Lives Matter protesters from unmarked federal troops. As we fight both the virus and anti-Black racism, what we are collectively learning — and seeing — is that active empathy is…
