Teacher Education and the Enduring Significance of "False Empathy"

• In Event: 73.051 - Race(ing) Teacher Education: Critical Race Theory as a Transformative Practice in Teacher Education

Abstract

The concept “False Empathy” posited by critical race theory luminary Richard Delgado (1996) easily obscures White teacher’s good intentions to be effective educators of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Delgado is confounded by the justice system’s failure to account for the culturally specific needs of poor people and people of color. In response to his lament, the central character of Delgado’s counternarrative, Rodrigo, responds,
Empathy would work in a just world, one in which everyone’s experience and social histories were roughly the same, unmarked by radical inequality. In such a world, we would have things to trade. There would be reasons for needing to get to know others, for understanding what they feel and need. But, as we mentioned earlier, we don’t live in such a world. (p. 94)
Rodrigo too feels the burden of misinterpretation, having been a subject of racial injustice. His pessimism points to a larger, systemic problem of disparities in perspective, or points of view between members of majority and subordinated culture groups. Ideally, empathy is theorized as the mechanism that reconciles disparate perspectives. Yet, the dominant ideologies that shape the many policies and practices that cumulatively manifest “radical inequality” in U.S. social institutions are, at least in part, a result of the difference in the social and cultural perspectives used to make sense of, or interpret the world around us.

We argue that critical race theory is useful for isolating and explaining how race and racism intersect the teaching and learning process. Thus, equipping White teacher candidates with the requisite skills needed to become even more aware of perspectives and behaviors reflective of false empathy. In an effort to better comprehend under what conditions false empathy is cultivated, reified, or perpetuated in cross cultural student-teacher interactions, the authors reexamine data from two recent studies that explore White female teachers’ conceptions of empathy, its application, and its usefulness in interactions with students and families of color. This paper aims to spotlight various examples of false empathy based on a secondary analysis of qualitative research data (Heaton, 2000, 2008; Seale, 2010). Secondary data analysis includes reusing, “self-collected data in order to investigate new or additional questions to those explored in the primary research…” (Heaton, 2008, p. 35).

Findings demonstrate that false empathy may show up in three phases of classroom interaction: pre-contact, contact, and post-contact. Implications and recommendations for teacher preparation are discussed.

Authors

• Chezare A. Warren, Michigan State University

• Bryan Hotchkins, University of Utah