A Call for Empathy, or, How Stories Can Help
On this day, 75 years ago, the President of the United States issued an executive order requiring approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans (of which, about 80,000 were born on American soil) register with the US government and report to assembly centers. Subsequently, they were shipped with only what they could carry to internment camps, where they stayed until said camps were dismantled after the end of WWII. They were given days to sell off their businesses, properties, and life’s work. They lost their rights as American citizens, and became prisoners without trial.
Switch to our current political climate: we have a president who refuses to sell his empire claiming it would not allow him to get the full value of all of his assets. This man also supports reinstating internment camps, this time for Americans who identify as muslim. He would like these people to sell off all of their businesses, properties, assets, in a number of days, as we did to our Japanese brothers and sisters 75 years ago, but he will not sell off his own given the ample preparatory time he had through his campaign, nomination, and victory?
I am sad to say that much of the struggle of Japanese Americans I have only just started learning about. My white privilege has allowed me to turn a blind eye to this part of our history for much of my life. I grew up on the east coast, surrounded by few Asian Americans, and did not bother to learn more than what history classes offered on this topic (which is abysmally small). I am lucky to have a friend who has made it a part of her life mission to educate people on the history of her immediate ancestors, which is fascinating and beautiful and full of love, and more broadly on the history of Japanese people in America.
One night she recently recommended a book to me (read: she placed this book in my lap and told me to read it): When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka. It is a small book, and if I were to read it over again I would want to read it all in one sitting. Instead, I read it parceled out over a week; 30 minutes on the bus, 15 minutes before bed. I was struck by my flashbacks to all of the Holocaust books I was required to read growing up in school, but could not recall a single required reading about Japanese internment from an english class. Here is this woman, an American woman, writing so beautifully about tragedy in our own country that I’m sure most Americans, unless they are Japanese, know little about.
Through this book I expanded my knowledge of Japanese internment from the perspective of one fictional family. Our country separated families, disrupted lives, isolated people, and fundamentally changed them through internment. It was a racially charged order that played on people’s fears that “a Jap’s a Jap” and that “anyone of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. had to be rounded up simply because Japanese racial characteristics made it impossible to distinguish ‘the sheep from the goats’ — no matter how much time was available.” Through the miseducation of our people (myself included) -- by leaving out the true horrors that we committed -- we are convincing people that it is fine to do again, despite ample evidence that came to light that this should not have happened. Our government
Though it may seem like it, I am not here to lecture people into what to believe. I am here to recommend empathy. Empathy was a word that I needed to learn in 5th grade for social studies. I remember learning that it was not sympathy, though it sounded similar. We can feel sympathy for someone without feeling empathy. To feel sympathy is to feel bad for them. To feel sympathy will not make you want to help change or dismantle the systems of oppression they have experienced. To feel empathy is to put yourself in their shoes. It is to understand something from outside of your own perspective. To empathize is an education in the lived experiences of those unlike yourself. And very often, if we can truly feel empathy for others, we will want to raise the bar on how these people are treated because we would not want that for ourselves. My friend who recommended the book to me was smart. She knew she could tell me about Japanese internment all day, but to even have a true sliver of understanding, I would need to start reading about the human condition of the events, and she acted on that quickly.
NPR recently recommended that to understand why Trump won the election, we must read books stemming from the areas in which he had concentrations of voters. This is because reading teaches us empathy. It literally shows us the perspective of another, it shows us their world through their own lens, it grabs us and carries us along, and teaches us what it means to live life through another perspective. At the same time, it can be familiar because it engages our own imagination, and allows us to consume it on a personal level that speaks to our truth in addition to our own. All of this is safely done without engaging in conversation with someone else, which means we don’t need to ‘win’ the conversation, and thus we are free to let our guards down and truly hear an outside perspective.
I too, would like to recommend reading as a way to gain this empathetic perspective. I believe that a huge reason that I am who I am today is because of the diverse collection of books I poured over growing up. But when you read, consciously read books about those who are unlike yourself. Are you a man? Read about women. Are you comfortably middle class? Read books about working class citizens, hell, read about wealthy citizens. Are you cis? Straight? Read about trans, or those who fall on the LGBTQ spectrum. Are you white? Christian? Read about POC’s. Read about Muslims. Make it about understanding this so-called enemy that our president wants us to treat as less than human. Read, and using your new level of empathy for these populations, look at the political rhetoric we are seeing and hearing from this administration through their eyes, and tell me you still stand by those decisions.
For those who already engage in the act of empathy through reading, I pose a question: What books have you read that opened your eyes to a historical moment or worldview of “others” that you had no idea existed, or knew little about?
