Among the Basic Impediments That Hinder Most Whites from Embracing

Among the basic impediments that hinder most whites from embracing an alternative and authentic liberty-and-justice framing of society is their lack of empathy for people of color. Systemic racism involves social alexithymia, which is the learned inability of most whites to understand or to want to understand the lived experiences of people of color. Meaningful transformation is possible but it is not easy and typically involves at least three stages: sympathy, empathy, and autopathy. Drawing on examples from Chapter 4, illustrate each of the three stages.
i. The preliminary stage, sympathy, is the most common but is limited. It customarily involves a readiness on the part of whites to set aside some racist stereotypes, images, and hostility in favor of a responsive, if mutable curiosity, regarding the negative experiences of racialized others.
ii. Empathy is a higher stage of transformation, in that it necessitates a more advanced capacity to consistently cast-off distancing stereotypes and other white-racist framing. It requires a conscious and continuous ability to see and feel some of the pain suffered by the racially oppressed.
iii. Autopathy, the most advanced of the stages, occurs only when a white person consciously puts themselves into the racist world of the oppressed, even if limitedly. At this juncture, not only do whites experience racist hostility from other whites but they also endure secondary racial pain, most typically when they become intimates of people of color (e.g., parents, partners, friends). As a consequence, they directly and regularly witness what it means to be a victim of white racism.

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