A year ago Tuesday, the world watched as George Floyd's life was taken from him in an agonizing 9 1/2-minute video — a murder a police officer was convicted of committing. This month, we saw long-suppressed footage of troopers stunning and punching
Ronald Greene as he apologized for leading them on a high-speed chase. He too died.
Millions of us watched those videos. But we didn't all see the same things, and part of the reason is empathy. On a basic level, how we hear the words of Floyd — and more recently, the words of Greene — depends on our level of empathy.
But not everyone had the same response. To get a sense of why — and to learn whether America's relationship with empathy is changing — we spoke to two people who have spent decades studying empathy and bias:
Elizabeth Segal, a professor at Arizona State University's School of Social Work, and
Jody David Armour, a criminal justice and law professor at the University of Southern California.
Let's get the big question out of the way: Do you see a lack of empathy as one reason racism continues to thrive in the U.S.?
Segal: It's the lack of social empathy. You have a lot of people who don't have any experience or insight into people of other races, and that fills a void that often can be filled with stereotypes and displaced anger: "I'm not getting ahead because of them." It's the other-ness of people. We have intrinsic tools for empathy, but we have to
learn how to be empathic.
Jody David Armour: Absolutely, yes. But we have to carefully define terms, what we mean by racism, because a lot of my work recently and even early in my career was on unconscious bias. You know, something people now like to refer to as implicit bias.
I initially was looking at how at the descriptive level, people unconsciously make harsher judgments about Blacks. But more recently, I came across studies involving brain imaging, that essentially show you your brain — and then here's your brain on race. It's a phenomenon called "in-group empathy bias."
The study was based on the phenomenon that occurs when a person sees someone of the same race drinking water — the observer will simulate what he or she sees, in their mind. They don't pantomime it, but their brain's mirror neurons allow them to simulate what they see.
They found a tendency for that to fail when it comes to race. So that if you're someone, say, white and you're looking at somebody Black who is drinking a cup of water, your mirror neurons are less likely to fire. So, the basic building blocks of empathy and sympathy aren't there.
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