Failing Forward: White Empathy and the Work To Do

Pop quiz, hotshot -- whose pain did you center this week?

White friends… 🖤 … what an emotional roller coaster the past few days have been. And, TBH, I found myself hurt & disappointed by a surprising number of you as the empathy many of you have had to learn to work up for non-white victims of violence just welled up for that terrible white man — no hesitation, no questions. Because you saw yourselves in him. Your kinship with his skin quickly and easily overrode the objectionably awful content of his character. Y’all ate up whiteness’ version of empathy, regurgitated its talking points, and failed this week’s ally test.

And that’s okay. It was just one test. And in the best classes with the best teachers, test results are not just grades, they are graphs of how concepts and information have been grasped. As much as we all hate to fail (and especially hate to be caught failing 😖) it is a much more effective teaching tool than success. It shows you where you still have work to do.

And we all still have work to do. But not all at the same level. If you failed this week’s test, please do not disrupt the class by trying to argue with the TAs. With all due disrespect — white people DO NOT have enough experience with empathy to be lecturing anyone else about it. So if you found yourself judging and/or tsk-tsking others for being unable and/or unwilling to hold space for the loss/wife/kids of that terrible white man the way you did, you were wild and WRONG for that. Full stop. And you can argue with me if you want to, but before you do — think about it: what on earth, in history, in America, could have taught you to be more knowledgeable about or better at empathy than me? Who would you have learned it from?

You thinking you have it and are good enough at it to argue with me or other misrepresented people about it is white supremacy doing its thing. You are an emotional novice. A moral child with a childish morality. Sit down and listen while the elders are talking.

You know that saying — “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” A lot of you failed because you didn’t know enough to know the inverse was the right rule to follow in this situation. If you did have something nice to say about that terrible white man, you should have kept it to yourself. Because who was it for? Who was that to offer comfort or kindness to? And why was/is your concern for them? That terrible white man had friends and family — it is their place and their job to mourn him and remember him well. What made you feel compelled to get in on that? What exactly are you mourning the loss of?

Right after the murder, someone in these Substack streets wrote a screed against the murderer, preemptively dressing them down for the damage they had done to the left, to “our side,” with their actions. Because the writer was someone I knew of, but not someone I actually know, it was an easy and immediate mute for that spectacular fail. That person, like way too many of y’all, was already conceding to and using their platform to cooperate with the fact-free far-right propaganda that paints the left as the violent actors and reactors.

Anything is possible, so hypothetically, there was always a slim chance it was a leftie, but historically, statistically, morally — come on, y’all. We all knew or should have known exactly who it was going to be. Even the governor of Utah knew — that man stood up there in all his fragile white glory and admitted, not that he was confident or convinced, but that he had been hoping and praying it was “somebody else.” Because even he knew the odds were not in his favor.

So all of y’all rushing to reprimand, to rebuke, and to thought-police folks “on your side” for not performing your respectability politics — the white devil owes you thanks for doing his work.

You failed. You were weighed in the balance and found wanting. And that’s okay. We live to learn.

So what have you learned this week? Not about empathy or loyalties in general, but about YOU and YOURS. Who did your heart go out to? Whose feelings did you prioritize the protection of? Whose agenda did you lend your power to? And now with a little bit of hindsight, what would you do differently? And with some foresight — what will you do differently? Not next time — now. Today.

Within all the jokes to be made about the sad realities of white-on-white crime, there is a huge truth to be reckoned with: white men are the only ones who can ever truly vanquish whiteness. The rest of us can fight it, we can unsubscribe, we can wound it and slow it down — but only white men can truly end its life, by killing it in themselves and then by refusing to prolong its life in other white men, by refusing to overlook it.

Are y’all really going to let Donald Trump give that terrible white man the Presidential Medal of Freedom? To let him be numbered among and remembered as one of the greats of your people? Really?

And if you are a white man saying to yourself, “Well, what can I do, he is the president…” are you not horrified and do you not find it embarrassing to have so easily abdicated all your power to such a stupid, shallow, and selfish saboteur?

I mean… I get it. I recently posted a YouTube video about why I think white people legitimately don’t know what to do at this time in history. And in general, I place no hope in and have no illusions about white men leading the way to a better future¹ (TL,DW: they don’t know the way. How could they? Where would they have learned it?) Which is not to say they can’t be part of a better future or have a place in it — they absolutely can and will. But that place cannot and will not be front and center. That time is over.

And only you know how you truly feel about that. Or maybe you don’t. If you think you’re okay with it, but you are unable to center the feelings and lived realities of the people targeted and harmed by the hateful rhetoric of that terrible white man right now — you ain’t ready.

And that’s okay. We live and learn.

And now that you have learned how much empathy, sympathy, and kinship you still have for whiteness and terrible white men who uphold it — what are you going to do?

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1. Not in any arena in reality or fiction. Severance fans — I’m telling you right now, don’t get your hopes up, it’s not gonna end well.