White Saviors, Dark Empathizers
Last summer after the George Floyd protests, I, like so many of us, joined an abolitionist reading group I had heard of through a friend. In the first session, we read a piece by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. I loved it, so I came back. This time, we discussed the documentary True Justice about lawyer, activist, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson. Things went differently this time.
There were about eight of us in that Zoom room, including two of my good girlfriends. I was the only person of color. They began by talking about how much they admired Stevenson. Fair enough. Me too. But I noticed that they spoke of him in a sort of “bless his heart” and “can you imagine” kind of way. The conversation turned to some of the unjustly incarcerated people featured in the documentary, how their lives had been broken by the system. They shared how devastated they were about the racism at the heart of our criminal justice system. Many became emotional. I soon found myself in the all-too-familiar position of coaching them through those feelings.
In social justice circles, they have a term for this. What I’ve described above is the familiar phenomenon of “white tears.” And there was more than enough of that happening, to be sure. But there was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The way they spoke about Stevenson, it’s as though he were a strange, albeit admirable, being. They worried about his health, his eating habits, why he wasn’t married and didn’t have children. He became in their rendering an object of curiosity, and an object of pity.
Later, after the meeting, my friend called me to check in. “You looked like you were in pain,” I recall her saying. And I think I was, it’s just that in the swirl of events surrounding the George Floyd protests, I couldn’t yet verbalize it. The thing is I was picking up on something in every majority white space I entered in those days. Certainly, I was amazed by the sudden outpouring of empathy, the kind so many of us had long waited for. This should have been a good thing, and in some ways it was. But something still felt off.
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I’ve spent the last couple of months thinking about the relationship between whiteness and empathy. And I’ve drawn on useful frameworks to help me understand it. I’ve relied especially on philosopher Fritz Breithaupt’s The Dark Side of Empathy. Now, Breithaupt begins with a real bummer of a premise. He argues that empathy is a form of commandeering another's experience, reducing it down to just a few major elements. In the process, we turn the other into an observed object (13). According to Breithaupt, we don't really take on the perspective of the person in harm's way but rather the perspective of the helper or intervener. He even goes one step further, claiming that we can really only identify if there is a possibility of helping or intervening.
Given my preoccupations, I couldn’t help but notice that this sounded precisely like the white savior complex that social justice advocates warn against. The white savior complex is a sort of mottled version of empathy. Those afflicted with a white savior complex will inevitably compel the person they seek to help into victimhood status, thereby trapping them, denying them agency, and inadvertently establishing their own superiority as the helper (140-141). It is similar, then, to what Breithaupt calls “vampiricist empathy.”
According to Breithaupt, "Vampiristic empathy hides the emptiness of the empathizer and fills the void with the experiences of others who can be hollowed out in the process...The dark empathizer wants some aspect of the other for themself; their interest in the other's well-being comes and goes as it serves this end" (217). In this way, empathy becomes “a means to intensify or enrich one's own experience,” (218) a version of "self focus that is masked by other-focus" (220).
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DEI work is a terrain ripe for vampiricist empathy. We are, after all, working with historically marginalized students who have indeed had it tough. It’s not very hard to point to their life circumstances and say, “Hey, isn’t this so terrible, don’t you want to help alleviate this?” As someone who has spent the last ten years undertaking DEI work in predominantly white institutions, I’ve come across my fair share of white saviors and dark empathizers.
I’ve written elsewhere about my experience in summer 2020 facilitating racial healing groups that typically included Black students and predominantly white faculty and staff. I described there the moral and ethical challenges I faced in those spaces. On the one hand, I sought to create a space where Black students felt safe enough to express their rage, fury, and sadness about anti-Blackness and systemic racism. On the other, I was participating in a process that instrumentalized that pain in order to awaken the empathy of white colleagues, many of whom had been indifferent or even hostile to this work just weeks before. They only changed their mind after they saw with their own eyes the state-sanctioned murder of a Black man on TV.
If we are observant, DEI practitioners will eventually come to realize that, in order to bypass uncomfortable topics with our colleagues about institutional whiteness and anti-Blackness, we can instead rely on empathy. We can harp on the plight of marginalized students, awakening white sympathies and sparking a white savior complex that we can later turn to our advantage. In order to galvanize largely white faculty and administrators to enact care for marginalized students, lead DEI practitioners may consciously encourage their performance of empathy and other-directed care. What I’m saying is we use vampiric empathy to our advantage.
Activating the white savior complex is especially easy with liberal white women, who may serve as faculty or administrative professionals. As Kate Manne argued in Entitled, other-directed care is a socially-sanctioned and morally-appropriate way for women, and white women, in particular, to enact empathy on behalf of those who are deemed “less fortunate” (89-90). Indeed, this is a legacy of the ways that, historically, white middle-class American women justified their entry into the public realm, claiming it was a necessary extension of the feminine norms of care, nurturing, and empathy into the cold, rational male sphere of state and politics. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they concentrated in the fields of education and social work, with dire consequences for Black, Native, and other poor and working-class peoples.
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Though galvanizing white saviors and dark empathizers is one way to get things done, Breithaupt warns us that it’s ultimately unreliable. These bright flashes of empathy are just that – flashes. "False empathy,” he warns, “shakes one out of apathy, often quickly and strongly, but then dissipates and returns the false empathizer back into moral or political lethargy" (158).
In the wake of summer 2020, we can’t deny that Breithaupt is on to something. The flicker of liberal and progressive white empathy that burned so bright last year has all but gone out. If you talk to DEI practitioners in predominantly white institutions, they’ll tell you that the whitelash is already upon them. Same goes for US society. Just think of the hullabaloo surrounding Critical Race Theory at the moment.
In spite of the unreliability of quick flashes of empathy, and for all the scorn social justice advocates heap on white saviors, at the end of the day DEI practitioners know nothing will happen unless we successfully enlist them into the struggle for social justice. It’s a jarring reminderof how and why social justice activists must always be on the lookout for a good crisis, because we know we must act quickly before that flicker of empathy goes out and attentions turn elsewhere once more.