empathy's double-edge

on allies and solidaridad

Another outlash of violence.

This time in New Jersey. A goon squad of masked ICE agents rolling up on an armored vehicle: pepper spraying, truncheoning, tackling and arresting people out defending their neighbors.

I can’t get out of my head this scene: a person pushed backwards by an ICE agent just as an 18-wheeler on the adjacent road rolls by. The person’s lower leg cracked sideways at the ankle, the foot pancaked on the asphalt.¹

I think, too, of death by toothache in an immigration camp in Arizona, I think of the increasing use of solitary confinement: outright torture.

With increasingly pervasive (if sometimes quiet) affronts to our families and communities from the immigration enforcement regime, indignation — however stingingly we feel it — is not sufficient.

Add in the profligate wars, attacks on free speech, the ripping away of driver’s licenses, the diverting of funds from education and healthcare, the weaponization of the justice system, and direct assaults on and surveillance of people stepping up and pushing back. And here we are in election season, all the oxygen (and all the damn money) overspent on them. We need to see both through and beyond elections right now.

Which begs the question, to me, to many of us who are not — for now — directly targeted. How to be an ally? How to be an effective ally or accomplice, not merely in name or spirit, but as one that shares burden, offers real protection, and works towards real (not just electoral) change?

It’s not about positionality, but about directionality. That’s to say: effective empathy is not static. Michelle Castañeda, in her great book, Disappearing Rooms, writes movingly of “kinesthetic empathy.”

“If we want to accompany another person,” Castañeda writes, “it is not enough to advocate for them from a safe distance.” You need to inhabit “the spaces they inhabit, which are generally spaces of struggle, danger, or isolation.”

You need to put yourself on the line.

Saidiya Hartman, in her dense and magisterial Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, further complicates the empathetic impulse: empathy’s push (and power) to “obliterate otherness” by turning feeling for you into feeling for myself.

She warns of the “dangers of a too-easy intimacy,” in which “empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead.”

Which is why simple empathy isn’t enough, why Castañeda calls for a more active, or kinesthetic, flavor of it. I think such an approach approximates solidarity (tho I’ve always been partial to the ring of the Spanish version of the word; see subtitle above) or maybe what we could call solidaristic empathy. At its core, true or effective empathy must be directional, not just positional. We need movements.

I touched on some of this in a recent conversation I had with Truthout’s Kelly Hayes, for her Movement Memos podcast (Great, kinesthetic title there). Hayes also has a newsletter I like.

I’ll end this section with a quote from Susan Briante — from her book Defacing the Monument — that recently shook me:

In her essay, “Poetry is not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes: “For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt…”

To which I’ll add this corollary: There may be no new atrocities, only the imperative to make them newly felt.”

While we must be careful of — to lean back into Hartman — the “thin line between witness and spectator,” one way to make these atrocities newly felt is to go to the poets: always a good thing.

Reading

Literature — sometimes including journalism — can obliterate otherness, and the best of it is not the ogling or merely spectative kind, but literature of witness. One atrocity newly felt, by me, is the severe capitalist exploitation of coalminers in 19th century France, thanks to Émile Zola.

Probably the most exciting book I’ve read — where I’m just propulsively hooked — since Paul Lynch’s Profit Song (speaking of “radical empathy,” that book was a project seeking to “deepen the dystopian”), Germinal is stunning. Published in 1885, as the thirteenth in the Les Rougon-Macquart literary cycle of twenty books, it tells the story of an 1860s coalminers’ strike in northern France. Leaning into the political philosophy of anarchist thinkers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, the novel is an exemplar of “literary naturalism.” Exploring a nearly scientific approach to social issues, Zola portrays the gross abuses the bourgeoisie inflicted on poor miners, subjecting them to horridly dangerous conditions, including starvation wages, as they toiled deep underground.

Some of the most memorably harrowing scenes I’ve read in a while: a horse drowning in the pitch darkness, a desperate woman mooning (because she’s not close enough to spit) an overseer in a window, frantic rescues through deep underground coal roads, a castrated penis on a spike, or beautifully rendered quiet moments of workers picking up their lamps and picks and disappearing “down the black throat of the mine.”

Listening

After years of not being able to listen to audio books, I’ve finally found my way in. A great non-fiction book, The Spy and the Traitor, from Ben Macintyre was the moreish, and now, on a recommendation from my friend Ryan Devereaux, I’m in the rich, heart-rending, polyvocal sonic world of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I’m swooning to the sounds of it…

1. deliberately not hyperlinking here, but you can look it up if you must