Jiyoon Ahn Akachi Emighara Dr Alexander Hernandez SOCI 314 502 Empathy Walls Constructed through Unconscious Racism A Self Analytical Essay In high school I always believed the slang term nigga was unoffensive I had black friends who were okay with it so why would anyone else have a problem with my language I was sadly misguided When I used this term freely around my friend s roommate Ex he stiffened up immediately We entered one of the most heated arguments of my life with debris thrown around the room because I truly believed that it was not something he could be upset at I grew up in fourth ward Houston and falsely believed this certified me to be above judgment Ex on the other hand grew up in an extremely impoverished area in Chicago He told me that where he grew up he WAS just another nigga a statistic in the system a number not a name a nobody The difference between his childhood experience and mine was overwhelming and my ignorance showed its ugly colors through a conversation that should have never needed to take place I felt ashamed Unknowingly I created an empathy wall between us even though I considered him a good friend of mine Trumps proposed physical wall is a manifestation of an equally problematic wall already built within America empathy walls An empathy wall is a concept defined by Arlie Hoschild 2016 to be any obstacle stemming deep from our beliefs and childhood experience that hinders us from understanding another person These empathy walls can cause individuals to be unable to empathize with others from different backgrounds In my humble opinion Empathy walls are more apparent in the United States because there is more ethnic cultural and economic diversity than any country in the world Morin 2014 My empathy walls stem from my roots coming from my Korean American ethnicity socio economic background and school upbringing Despite being a minority I am not free from blame for racism Unconscious racism Ojiaku 2019 that stems from my ethnicity might not result in offensive actions but still creates a dangerous empathy gap I grew up as a minority within my community that consisted of mostly Hispanic Americans and African Americans Growing up with a culturally diverse group did help my understanding but I was also limited I was sheltered from cultural diversity because I went to a K 12 school that was 90 Asian and white This magnet school was thirty minutes by car from where I lived and consisted of a totally different economic class of students The fact that we were one of the only Asian families in the neighborhood compounding with the fact that our house was robbed three times over the 13 years that we lived there my parents fostered an irrational fear towards the different members of our community These feelings expressed themselves in microaggressions such as locking our car doors when driving past ethnic minorities that did not look like us and separating ourselves from interacting with people in our neighborhood These microaggressions persisted even though our family was aware that we were just as socio economically disadvantaged as our neighbors This wall of empathy was maintained by my school because I only had the chance to interact with people who came from the same ethnic backgrounds as me As a child I mainly belonged to white spaces as described by Elijah Anderson 2015 in contrast to the minority space that I lived in These white spaces Anderson 2015 were places African Americans and Hispanic Americans did not have the privilege to transverse freely while white Americans and privileged Americans did Through my hobby of dance I was able to become much more culturally diverse in high school where I found more common ground with members of different ethnic backgrounds With time I also experienced many microaggressions that characterize minority experiences My name was always mispronounced my opinion was marginalized and I was only ever taken as seriously as my grades were Even when it came to my own race I would experience microaggressions eluding towards my financial status I could not participate in events that required money and therefore not included Although these transgressions are not the same as people of different ethnic background I can use these experiences as an empathy bridge to understand the grievances of others This empathy bridge is rooted within research that has shown individuals of ethnic minorities in the US can better empathize with different ethnic minorities in comparison to white subjects who revealed a strong bias towards own race individuals Azevedo et al 2013 Even though I have the knowledge and capability of empathy I realize that many times it is not enough just to have it in mind In college I believed that I was woke that I understood what counts as insulting and what doesn t I was guilty of virtue signaling to show my peers that I was not racist when in fact I was still part of a massive problem unconscious racism Virtue signaling Judge 2017 is the concept defined by James Bartholomew as the belief that one has virtue simply by showing the positive or negative opinion of polarizing events I believed that my experiences of injustice created an empathy bridge strong enough to understand the feelings of others from different ethnic backgrounds This created a dangerous concept of colorblindness an approach to racism that states the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible without regard to race culture or ethnicity Williams 2011 This ideal is dangerous because it ignores one baseline fact that individuals do not start off equally at least in America The effects of privilege are pervasive in all aspects of our daily life most of which is neatly packaged in an excerpted essay from Peggy McIntosh 1990 In this essay she describes 50 main effects that white privilege has on daily life to uncover the veil of racism in America Many of these effects are the norm to individuals who do not experience the lack of such effects To feign ignorance is to brush the problem under the rug Through many experiences such as the one I stated at the beginning of this paper I gained the understanding that I cannot have an expectation that I fully understand another person I learned that the best way to stay vigilant of my empathy walls is to take others seriously when they express discomfort towards what they believe is insulting The greatest empathy bridge I can impose is to understand my own limitations I