Empathy and Racial Justice: Redefining Impartiality in Response to Social Movements

Abstract

This chapter considers white people's empathetic responses, and lack thereof, to social movements like BLM and examines the consequences of such affects in terms of ideas of impartiality and justice. It analyzes objections to the use of empathy in large-scale problems of justice from Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz and suggests an alternate idea of impartiality, drawn from Adam Smith and Ray Jasper that can respond to the social movements like BLM. Defining the phenomenon of colorblindness through research in epistemologies of ignorance, it argues that the idea of ``just'' impartiality as detached from empathy too closely resembles the harmful ideal of colorblindness to be useful to the aims of racial justice. Instead, white people's responses to social movements require the hard, rare, but possible work of interaction and empathy, in order to work for justice.