The Cruelty of Empathy in Teacher Education

• In Event: 28.075 - Feminist Affect Theory and Education: The Cruel, Complex (and Politically Inflected) Emotions of Teaching Today

Abstract

Empathy is often treated as an unqualified virtue in the work of teaching: teachers are encouraged to empathize with their students, and to teach students to empathize with each other. Rhetoric around empathy is especially prevalent when predominantly White, middle-class teachers work with poor students of color; through empathy, purportedly, teachers can bridge the effects of centuries of race- and class-based segregation and truly “understand” or even “serve” their students. As a result, the teacher education literature is full of
activities designed to cultivate teachers’ empathy for people unlike themselves. These experiences typically focus on understanding the perspectives of one target group, with the intention that teachers then become more prone to empathy in general.

In this paper, I argue that forms of cruel empathy interfere with what we seek when we call for empathy: a “true” understanding or the development of trusting interpersonal relationships. I use “cruel” in the tradition of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which describes an attachment to something whose attainment makes thriving impossible. A cruel empathy, then, is an empathy that seeks to understand the perspectives of subjects other than the self but, when achieved, makes it impossible to engage meaningfully with such perspectives.

Drawing on the work of philosophers such as Megan Boler, bell hooks, and Alexis Shotwell, I identify three forms of cruel empathy as they present in vignettes of teachers’ practice taken from my experience as a teacher educator. First, I look at projection as the form of cruel empathy that may be most woven into our culture, or at least most easily called for because of its commonality in aphorisms, and its solipsism. Next, I turn conceptualizations of identification as a cannibalism that erases difference and the different, and then consider the cruelty of absorption as a passive listening that actually absolves the empathizer of responsibility to empathize. The harder that teachers try for empathy in the forms of projection, identification, or absorption, the further they are likely to get from understanding the perspectives of and developing trusting interpersonal relationships with their students, because these forms of empathy are simplistic, deceptive, and cruel.

Finally, I imagine alternative approaches to empathy in the work of teaching and propose that only through these alternatives can teachers engage meaningfully with others, particularly with those whose perspectives are separated from theirs by the domination of inequitable power relations. These alternatives require a deliberate attention to others’ points of view that is grounded in what Haraway (1991) calls “elaborate specificity and difference.” In other words, one must perhaps paradoxically preserve a “necessary distance” between the self and other by marking and foregrounding the particularities of self and other, in order to understand any perspective that is not one’s own. Only by doing so can teachers open up possibilities for a cruelty-free empathy.

Author

• Grace A. Chen, Vanderbilt University