Empathy’s Hue?

We like to believe human suffering simply reveals itself to decent people. We imagine that when cruelty becomes visible enough, moral clarity will follow. But empathy is not merely discovered. It is cultivated, directed and taught. Just as importantly, it can be narrowed, muted and withheld without anyone experiencing that narrowing as a conscious choice.

That may be one of the most uncomfortable truths about racial hierarchy. As I document in greater detail in A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity, the cultivation and withholding of empathy are not incidental features of racial hierarchy but essential mechanisms through which it operates. America has shown that it knows how to make suffering visible, to transform public indifference into moral urgency and to take a population previously treated with suspicion and make that population appear human and deserving of rescue. The question is not whether America can cultivate empathy but rather why that machinery activates so unevenly.

World War II exposes this with brutal clarity. We tell the story as if America’s moral awakening to the Holocaust was immediate and inevitable, but for years after the start of World War II, Jewish refugees were turned away. Antisemitism remained powerful and many Americans resisted expanded immigration for Jewish people fleeing Nazi terror. Even though the suffering was real, public empathy remained limited and politically ineffectual until the federal government acted.

It created the War Refugee Board. The Board amplified the language of extermination, released eyewitness accounts and pushed that evidence into newspapers, making Jewish suffering visible, urgent and morally undeniable. The result was that a population once wrongfully viewed with suspicion was reframed as the innocent victims they were and deserving of rescue. Drawing on historian Eric Goldstein’s work, this shift in public empathy may have been made easier, in part, by the contemporaneous incorporation of Jewish people into America’s expanding boundaries of whiteness.

Even as America was learning to recognize the suffering of people who could be brought within whiteness, much of white America remained largely unmoved by nonwhite suffering occurring at the same time even though much of it was inflicted or tolerated by the American government itself.

The government knew public concern could be redirected, and moral perception could be changed. Yet it mounted no comparable, sustained national campaign to make Black suffering visible, urgent and morally undeniable to the white public, despite centuries of brutality and deprivation inflicted on Black Americans. Nor was such a campaign mounted for Native families devastated by federal policies, including the forced removal of Native children to government-sponsored boarding schools, or for Black soldiers who, after fighting for this country in World War II, were sometimes treated worse than white German prisoners of war and then systematically denied equal access to many of the educational and housing benefits of the GI Bill.

That is one of the starkest forms of racial hierarchy: some suffering can be moved into the circle of public concern more readily than other suffering because of whiteness or white adjacency. White privilege is not the childish caricature that every white person has had an easy life. Not the unserious claim that white poverty, trauma or hardship do not exist. White privilege means that white suffering is more readily recognized as human suffering. The result is that some victims are more easily recognized as innocent, and some pain is more quickly translated into public concern.

The same sorting is visible in how the West responded to Ukrainian refugees compared with Syrian refugees. Ukrainians fleeing war were received, in much of the West, as families, neighbors and fellow humans. Their suffering was intimate. Their resistance was heroic. Their need for shelter was obvious. At the same time refugees from Syria and other nonwhite regions trying to enter Poland were treated as danger, disorder and burden.

Selective empathy based on race is why some refugees become mothers and children while others remain migrants. It is also why some fighters are freedom fighters and others become terrorists. And why some suffering becomes a moral emergency while other suffering remains a policy problem. Racial familiarity and cultural proximity shape the emotional speed with which suffering becomes real.

When crack addiction was framed as a Black urban problem, the response was punishment, contempt and incarceration. People suffering from addiction became “crackheads,” a word that turns human beings into pathology. When opioid addiction became associated with white families and white communities, the language changed. Addiction became a disease and the victims needed treatment, compassion and public health intervention. The moral vocabulary changed because the addict changed color.

That is how racial hierarchy launders itself. First, public policy distributes empathy, opportunity and credibility unequally and the unequal result is renamed merit. The original injustice becomes history and the people harmed by the system are told their disadvantage proves they did not try hard enough.

That is the real architecture of racial hierarchy. And it does not merely distort what we think but directs what we feel. It tells us whose pain should disturb us and whose pain can be managed, doubted, minimized or postponed. It tells us who deserves a national campaign of humanization and who must keep proving humanity one tragedy at a time.

This is why racism cannot be understood only as hatred because hatred is too easy a target. Most people can reject hatred and still participate in racial hierarchy. The deeper problem is selective empathy: the trained inability to feel equally when the suffering body is Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, poor or otherwise outside the circle of presumed belonging.

Selective empathy shapes law, war, immigration, policing and it shapes who receives rescue and who receives discipline. It shapes who is treated as a victim of circumstance and who is treated as the author of their own misery. And because it operates beneath awareness, it rarely feels like racism. It feels like prudence, realism, patriotism and fairness or the world simply as it should be.

America has already proven that it can teach itself to care. It can mobilize media, government, language and public pressure to make suffering impossible to ignore. But that machinery activates most powerfully when the suffering population can be brought within the circle of recognized humanity. When Black suffering, Native suffering, immigrant suffering or brown suffering remains politically invisible, the issue is not that America cannot feel. It is that our systems have trained us not to feel equally.

The racism good people cannot see is often embedded in what they have been taught not to feel. And until we confront the selective cultivation of empathy itself, we will keep mistaking our uneven compassion for moral truth.

*Rory Bahadur is the author of A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity and the James R. Ahrens Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law but his views are his own and do not represent those of Washburn University.

Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/14/empathys-hue/