“Eric Garner’s Death Highlights America’s Empathy Gap”

Posted on | December 17, 2014 | 1 Comment

Michael Magee,
CEO, Mayoral Academies

I have been struggling to put into words the range of emotions set off by the death of Eric Garner and others in the recent past. What is there left to say? Then this morning, I read an editorial in the Providence Journal written by my son, Michael, which perfectly captures the challenge we face as a civil society.

It’s title, “Eric Garner’s death highlights America’s empathy gap”, directs the focus of all caring Americans, and most especially those of us who have pledged our lives to caring for others.

In the body of the article, Michael says, “ It is easier to harm other human beings when you believe their lives have less value than your own, and easiest when you don’t consider them human beings at all. In a nation profoundly and increasingly segregated by race and class, we have the conditions for precisely this sort of dehumanization and concomitant violence. Institutions have grown up with it and around it and have perpetuated it.”

“Just as there is no ‘separate but equal’ there is no ‘separate but empathetic.’ There are many ways for human beings to develop empathy and understanding, to disabuse themselves of the inherited tribal suspicions that cause them to act like fools and devils. The experience of literature and art and great oratory can be a transformative window into the lives and perspectives of people whose cultural experiences have been very different from our own. But by far the greatest mother of empathy is social familiarity, or what we might just call friendship or community. To put it bluntly, public servants are less likely to put their friends and neighbors in choke holds.”

Near the end of the piece, he focuses on the role of education, an area he is more than familiar with as CEO of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies. He correctly sees our public education as essential to meaningful change. As he says, “ Highly restrictive neighborhood schools, their gerrymandered enrollment zones guided by the invisible hand of property value, should be opened to a broad cross-section of children that reflect the diversity of entire states. Given the unlikelihood of mandated desegregation, we should accomplish this through an expansion of racial and economically diverse public schools of choice. Those would be good places to start. We’ve got to start somewhere and we had better start now.”

Each of us has a role to play. As a starting point, I highly recommend that you take a few moments to read Michael Magee’s piece. You will find it HERE.

For Health Commentary, I’m Mike Magee.

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Comments

One Response to ““Eric Garner’s Death Highlights America’s Empathy Gap””

Mort S.
December 18th, 2014 @ 11:01 am

It is unlikely that the officers involved in Eric Garner’s arrest wanted to harm him. They simply were enforcing the ordinances that the mayor and city council enacted. His death was a tragic accident, but one in which he played a contributory role by resisting arrest. No one has a right to resist arrest. People rarely die from being wrestled to the ground. That Garner DID die is a tragedy, but was not the result of depraved or racist indifference. Plenty of white people have been wrestled to the ground for resisting arrest. You are imputing motives and attitudes to the police in this case (the supervising sergeant was black, by the way) for which there is no evidence.