A Call for Empathy

A Call for Empathy

Two things have happened recently in the US that were particularly disheartening: the US crossed the 100,000 deaths mark from COVID-19 and multiple, separate bouts of racism have caused a national stir. These are scary, angry, and frustrating times – and that makes sense.

Let’s start with COVID-19. 100,000 lives gone. Why was this not a more significant story-line? Coronavirus coverage fatigue? Perhaps. But, more troubling, is that the narrative has shifted. People are focused on getting their lives back. People are excited they get bars and restaurants back – me included. But, let’s not ignore at what was one of the devastating losses of life in American history, both in terms of speed and magnitude. To put it in perspective: COVID-19 is more deadly on a deaths per day than any wars the US has fought in and would be #4 (likely #3 when it’s all said and done) in terms of casualties on a list of Wars ranked by the total number of US deaths (ahead of the Vietnam War, Korean War, American Revolutionary War, War of 1812, etc.).

From an article in The Independent:

“The latest figure means more people in the US have now died from Covid-19 than the Korean War, Vietnam War, Afghanistan War and Iraq War combined.”

“In New York State alone, there have been more than 10 times the number of deaths from Covid-19 than there were fatalities during the 9/11 attacks.”

“The number of deaths from coronavirus in the US accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths around the world.”

Now to the racism. Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you’ve either seen, or read/heard about the Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd dying after cops stopped him for allegedly forging a check, and Amy Cooper calling the cops on Christian Cooper alleging he was threatening her life when he, in fact, was telling her to follow park rules. The Floyd story has been a top headline in recent days, as both peaceful and violent protests in Minneapolis have erupted as the topic of police brutality against black males became a national headline once again. A paper by a Harvard scholar (linked below) introduces the topic well, “The issue of police violence and its racial incidence has become one of the most divisive topics in American discourse. Emotions run the gamut from outrage to indifference. Yet, very little data exists to understand whether racial disparities in police use of force exist or might be explained by situational factors inherent in the complexity of police-civilian interactions”.

Trying to make sense of the statistics is a bit more conflicting:

• This study published in PNAS makes a clear conclusion: “The highest levels of inequality in mortality risk are experienced by black men. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women.”
• A Harvard Study in the middle: “On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. Interestingly, as use of force increases from putting hands on a civilian to striking them with a baton, the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases dramatically but the racial difference remains roughly constant. Even when officers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.2 percent more likely to endure some form of force in an interaction. Yet, on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls.”
• Another paper published in PNAS argues the opposite: “We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers”
  • Although, there are some compelling argument against this piece made here and here, respectively:
    • “The authors did not properly code categorical predictor variables. In a reply, the authors acknowledge this mistake and redid the analyses with proper weighted effect coding of categorical variables. Their new results are reported in Table. 1   The correct results show that the choice of predictor variables does have a strong influence on the conclusions…  Thus, after correcting the statistical mistake, the results are no longer consistent and it is important to examine which of these models should be used to make claims about racial disparities.”
    • “The main problem with Cesario and Johnson’s conclusion is that they rest entirely on the assumption that violent crime statistics are a reasonable estimate for the frequency of encounters with police that may result in the fatal use of force… It is telling that Cesario and Johnson are aware of an article that came to opposite conclusions based on a different approach to estimate police encounters and do not mention this finding in their article. Apparently it was more convenient to ignore this inconsistent evidence to tell their readers that data consistently show no anti-Black bias. While readers who are not scientists may be shocked by this omission of inconvenient evidence, scientists are all to familiar with this deceptive practice of cherry picking that is eroding trust in science.”

Bringing it back from trying to understand the data and numbers in both issues, though, I recognized the issue I was having in trying to make sense of it all was lacking because I was approaching it analytically vs. from an empathetic standpoint. Studying the numbers increases my depth of understanding of both of these issues to a point, but at the end of the day, in both cases, these numbers are lives and require a certain level of emotional compassion as well.

In my world – and most of my immediate network’s world – we’re mostly young and healthy, we work corporate jobs and are not essential workers, can work from home with relative ease, have stable incomes and savings, have family members in good health (for the most part), and aren’t the targets of situational or systemic racism. And, the incredulous thing is, my network is also among the most irritated that travel plans were canceled or that they can’t go to bars or also the most silent on the bouts of racism that went on.

However, in both these instances, in talking with friends, family, and coworkers, I have heard variations of the following:

• “No, I don’t any know anyone immediately passed away from COVID-19, but wow that’d be tragic if I did”
• “I couldn’t even imagine if that was my family member” [on situations like Ahmaud, George, or Christian]

In hearing some form of those statements over and over again, I kept coming back to the idea of empathy. We should view these events/situations/occurrences as if they did happen to you when assessing how to react. That quite, literally, is the definition of empathy.

“Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.”

The one thing I’ve really had time to reflect on in isolation is that people have really lost their ability to be empathetic, myself included. People have the ability to be empathetic but only when it’s convenient for us. Tangible. Maybe it happened to a coworker or a friend of a friend or a distant family member. Then it becomes real. When did we lose the ability to empathize with others we don’t know, that we don’t recognize or don’t resemble us?

Am I saying the following?

• On COVID: Do I think keeping everyone in their households and people out of work forever the answer? Of course not. I also empathize with those that have lost their jobs, their businesses, and their livelihoods due to this pandemic. We need to get them help too.
• On the nation-wide protests: Do I support the violent protesting or the bad actors among the peaceful protesters? Again, of course not. We should decry violence and it’s an absolute shame that people are using a crisis to act lawlessly.

Is there an easy answer on how to fix either? No chance. But the one thing I do know, is I emphasize with the fact that these decisions are not easy ones and I do not envy any policymaker that has to deal with either situation. Would I be more hesitant on reopening the economy broadly and returning everyone to work if I knew that I could potentially endanger hundreds to thousands of lives? Absolutely. Would I be out in the streets angry if people in my community were repeatedly taken advantage of and civil protesting has failed to produce results? Maybe. It’s not out the realm of possibilities.

This is my long-winded way of saying if you can empathize with people, do so. If that means I have to wear a mask when I go out, cancel vacations and bar outings, and WFH for the foreseeable future until our medical institutions can get a better grasp of the situation, so be it. If signing a petition demanding that those who acted outside of the law and caused unnecessary death be brought to justice is politicizing the issue, then label me an activist.

I know there are people that probably felt some type of way about both of these situations but didn’t want to say anything out of fear of “making it political”. But, let’s take a step back. How backwards is it though that the things that matter most, the things that impact the highest number of people, and the things that we should all voice our opinions on are the ones we shy away from the most? When did that become the socially normal thing to do? I’m not saying shout your political or societal viewpoints to every person that you interact with but have opinions, disagree with your friends, and promote intellectual discussion. Care about things that don’t directly impact you or your environment. That’s how we get actual solutions to these issues versus brushing them over and waiting until the next time something happens whether it to be someone else or you directly.

We need to get back to empathizing with one another. And hopefully recognizing it’s an issue gets it started for myself or anyone reading this.