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TAMU BIOL 112 - Empathy Walls Constructed through Unconscious Racism

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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 ethnicminorities 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


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TAMU BIOL 112 - Empathy Walls Constructed through Unconscious Racism

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