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kleinbl00  ·  1613 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thoughts on sympathy and empathy

    Other classmates accused us of having a "white savior" complex, but if nobody was being exploited and nobody felt bad about it who cares?

I have never seen these discussions of the limitations of empathy used for anything other than inoculating one group against criticism from another. You, for example, will never truly empathize with the people using the school that you've built. Therefore, your motives cannot be truly empathetic. Therefore, there is some other reason for your altruistic behavior therefore it is not truly altruistic. As a consequence, I can present myself as morally superior to you because I am not serving a false paradigm in order to buttress my (non-existent) empathetic characteristics. I am a better person - with more Purity Points - because I didn't try to prove something by selfishly helping others.

My wife has a friend. Catholic. Doing pretty well. She blows two weeks of vacation a year to volunteer as a healthcare worker in Haiti. Every year. Since 2010. She'll never be Haitian. She'll never want to be Haitian. Yet I have heard her criticized for her cultural appropriation and insensitivity for bringing her white savior complex to Haiti instead of vacationing like a normal person. The argument is that since she can't truly understand the struggle of living in a cardboard shack in Port-au-Prince she can't help those who do without accepting and understanding that she should feel guilty for wanting to. More than that, she owes an obligation to people of color who don't go to Haiti for two weeks a year because their understanding of the struggle of being homeless in Haiti is more perfect than hers.

My wife is in a bit of a thing right now. Of the six people she employs, four of them are minorities. Of the six students she's had at this clinic, five have been minorities. One of those students does not abide by the terms of the student/teacher relationship such that she will only follow instruction when it directly benefits her credential pathway. The work she does not desire to do, she does not do.

Things came to a head over the weekend because we went on vacation. The student left without permission, didn't do any work and refused to take instruction from her supervisor (another minority). And, as this supervisor was wrapping up to go do NGO stuff in Africa for three weeks, it came to my wife to sort out how we're going to handle this with the student's school.

Now - it doesn't matter to the school that the student has beef with a minority supervisor. It doesn't matter that the only reason my wife is interceding is that the supervisor in question is twelve thousand miles away. What matters, as far as the school and the student are concerned, is that my wife has no standing to judge the student's behavior because she's not a minority. That she's the only student with this problem (all three of which are minorities) does not factor into this. That no previous student has had this problem (all but one of which have been minorities) does not factor into this either. That my wife is acting in the interests of another minority who is unable to attend does not matter. Never mind the whole "it's our business, she signed a contract and we're just trying to get her to do what she agreed to do" angle to the thing. My wife, as a white woman, is being discouraged from requiring a minority student to adhere to the terms of her contract because she does not have the ethical standing to understand the struggle of minorities.

Will we take more minorities in the future? Of course we will. We favor minorities because we believe that the world benefits from diversity and the promotion of minority opinions increases the richness of culture and improves the fairness of the human experience. but we'll do it cringing because if we only hired white girls we wouldn't have to worry about our ability to run our business. Worthy of note: my wife's profession is one practiced almost entirely by conservative menopausal white women. My wife is one of the youngest by far. You think a 55-year-old Trump voter is going to put up with this shit? You think choosing this hill to die on really helps minority advancement in the long run?

But at least we have a nice, internally-consistent semantic argument.