The way I teach English is influenced by Linda Christensen, bell hooks, Parker Palmer, Bill McKibben, Jonathan Kozol, Jim Wallis, Vandana Shiva, and others. When people ask me what I teach in my English class, I of course talk about reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, speaking, listening, group work, and the rest. Thematically, though, the easiest answer to the question is that I teach empathy. My class might be called one long exercise in imagining oneself in another’s place, because, as Atticus says in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” As people who have discovered the joy of entering a fictional world and getting lost in a book, we all know the pleasure of walking around in another’s skin. The flipside of this empathic identification is also true, though: empathy, as an overarching objective, is sometimes at odds with protected privilege.
People of privilege can sometimes resist empathy because it calls into question our own privilege. As Americans, we don’t want to acknowledge that we are only 5% of the world’s population but that we consume 30% of the world’s resources. As men, we don’t want to acknowledge that we’ve never had a female President. As white people, we don’t want to acknowledge slavery, segregation, and the crippling persistence of poverty among communities of color in this country. As heterosexual people, we don’t want to acknowledge the hundred taunts and insults a day by which LGBTQ people are victimized. As a moral person of privilege, however, I am also aware that these preceding facts and statistics are neither inevitable nor morally supportable. We can remake our societies into more humane, ethical centers of humanity where everyone is welcome, valued, and represented. The more privileges a person embodies, though, the harder it becomes to acknowledge them. For someone like me, a heterosexual white middle class man, who embodies four positions of privileges, it can be a fearful thing to question my own unearned inheritance of privilege. I have never been the victim of institutional, systemic heterosexism or racism, and I benefit daily from it. The dominant culture in the U.S. works hard through the media, advertising, retail, and entertainment industries to convince me that whiteness is more trustworthy and rational than other ethnicities, that maleness is more confident and capable than femaleness, that we live in a meritocracy where people earn the money they deserve, and that straightness is the preordained human norm for 100% of us. Again, as a moral person of privilege, I am aware that these myths are clearly inaccurate and morally unsupportable. Pushing through the untruths and the luxury of my own ignorance, I know that to affirm my shared humanity with others on this planet and to affirm my place in the natural world and cosmos, as a person of privilege, I have to begin this tricky reckoning.
To be honest, to imagine living without these privileges (as if that were even possible today) is a fearful thought for me as a person of privilege. It’s very comfortable and reassuring for me to stick with the myths that racism, sexism, class inequality, and homophobia are non-issues in this world, that we all start on a level playing field and that if we work hard enough, we get what we deserve. I was born into the luxury of assuming these myths, but when I listen to the stories of people who are not me—people who are women, the non-white majority in the world, from other countries, the poor and working classes, and LGBTQ—I quickly realize that the myths that I have inherited are part of the problem. The myths of the privileged, our myths, go unexamined because examination brings up heartache and sadness, even as that examination also brings up joyful recognition, sometimes, of shared experience.
Sometimes students and parents of privilege react with anger to the examination of these myths and privileges. Why would a teacher bring up such unpleasant topics? Why would a teacher expose innocent minds to such horrible thoughts? In NAIS middle schools of privilege, progressive teachers sometimes hear from their communities that being empathetic by acknowledging some wrongs in the world is akin to dwelling on the negative in the world. These teachers can get labeled as angry, radical, and mean. That is why many progressive teachers have realized that for our own sanity and for that of our students and parents, we have to hold up a story of hope and transformation before and after each story of doom and travail, otherwise we can all lose sight of the objective. The teaching of empathy isn’t about assigning blame or judging one’s worthiness, like St. Peter at the pearly gates. The teaching of empathy is about something that resonates deeply within every human being: recognizing oneself in another’s experience and being recognized by others as belonging.
As teachers in NAIS communities of privilege, we have to continually reaffirm that it’s not about negativity but about including non-dominant stories so that people who have historically been the victims of prejudice and systemic injustice can be seen and heard, so that we, as privileged people, can become active partners with them, the historically disempowered, to transform our world into one more fair, loving, ecologically sustainable, and just—a world that is more like a community living in balance with Earth, the source of all we need to survive. If we don’t work in school to become active partners in transforming our world, all this talk about empathy, peace, justice, ecology, and love becomes empty academic exercise. We have to walk the walk if we want to talk the talk. Ironically, for people of privilege, it starts with listening, not talking—something we have not been very good at historically. If we want to affirm our bonds with all people around the globe; if we want to establish justice in the world; if we want to save Earth for human survival; if we want love to outlast the destructive forces of selfish materialism and callous indifference, then we must start with empathy, which starts with listening to and reading the stories of those (including Earth—which speaks in a different language) who have been marginalized and silenced.
This process of global empathic awareness is a difficult lifelong process, not an easy one-shot recipe that takes place in sixth or any one particular grade. We will experience fear, outrage, guilt, and anguish, but teachers are experts in navigating this difficult lifelong process, and we know how to read a room and our students’ feelings; we see when awareness becomes too heavy a burden that needs lightening with humor, play, and what’s right in the world; we also see when ignorance becomes a blockage that needs clearing by frank acknowledgement and analysis of our own privilege and complicity in what’s wrong in the world. Balancing the doom and the hope, the privilege and the transformation, so that all people around the world can survive and thrive is the teacher’s job.