Years before evangelicals began issuing warnings about “the sin of empathy,” Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, published a book warning against making ethical judgments based on identifying with others’ feelings. I read Against Empathy before I heard Christian conservatives warn that caring about LGBTQ people and immigrants led Christians to embrace anti-biblical public policy. But I had an uneasy intuition that Bloom was naming a real moral danger.
In anti-racism organizing, I’d witnessed what psychologists call the empathy gap: White people persistently underestimate the pain of Black people, with devastating consequences. Last year, Karrie Johnson was minutes away from giving birth and in obvious distress when a hospital nurse peppered her with questions and insisted that she complete her paperwork before being admitted. She’s not an exception. Health practitioners routinely downplay or ignore the reported pain of Black women like Johnson, leading to them being four times as likely to die in childbirth as White women.
The racialization of empathy also shapes judicial outcomes. One summer, after a Black man confessed to the murder of a White child, conservative activists in my state used empathy bias to reframe the tragedy as a racial murder. The public pressure campaign was aimed at White mothers like me. When the choice was framed between identifying with a Black man who confessed to murder or with White parents who were grieving a White child like mine, the activists were counting on my racial formation to decide for me.
