Empathy Is Fake
I went to the new Empathy Exhibit at the museum. Didn’t get what I was looking at, at first. Just a large, door-sized screen affixed to the wall. I noticed somebody seemed to have left their shoes at the foot of this screen, but on closer inspection it appeared these were very much part of the exhibit. Authentic Native American moccasins, c. 1776, adorned with quite the pleasing multicolored pattern of arrowheads stitched across the vamp.
I stepped into the moccasins, and VR goggles lowered from a trapdoor in the ceiling. I squeezed my skull into them, and was immediately dunked into a lifelike 18th century American landscape. A dirt road stretched out before me. Madly flashing text floated in the air a few feet in front of me, the anxious words BEGIN WALKING.
As I started down the dirt road, this text disappeared. I then noticed the words DISTANCE REMAINING: 0.999834 MILES (5279.12352 FEET) in the top-right corner of my fully 3D periphery. With each step forward I took, these numbers continued to decrement from the original 1.0 miles, headed toward 0. Some other Native Americans passed me on the road, giving me pleasant smiles and waves. I waved back, and my screen cracked and fractured, colors inverting for a flashing moment in a stereotypically “glitching” manner. I stumbled slightly, and noticed the other Natives’ smiles all begin to turn into deep frowns.
Suddenly a deep, wise-sounding Native American voice boomed over the entire landscape. High in the sky, I saw rendered the words spoken aloud, quotes included:
“Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps,
Or stumbles along the road.
Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears,
Or stumbled beneath the same load.”
“Oh, I get it,” I thought. The voice continued to boom, as the worry grew on the faces of the Natives.
“I believe you’d be surprised to see
That you’ve been blind and narrow-minded, even unkind.
There are people on reservations and in the ghettos
Who have so little hope, and too much worry on their minds.
The voice then began to “glitch out,” fluctuating wildly between the deep baritone of the wise Native American elder and the high-pitched voice of a white woman.
Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins
And remember the lessons of humanity taught to you by your elders.
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives, our kindnesses and generosity.
The glitching stopped, and the white-woman voice took over completely for the last line:
Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.”
I only had 0.02293 miles left when the words in the sky began to change. First they went from bright white to dark gray, swelling like rainclouds—and then they burst into smoke. The dissipated words rained to the ground and covered everything like a thick fog. I saw the Natives all around me collapse to the ground, choking on the toxic air, yelling for help. Then the smoke began to fill my VR-eyes and lungs.
I took the VR headset off and read the museum label next to it for an explanation:
While empathy seems to come naturally for all other world peoples, history suggests Caucasians are oddly lacking in this capacity. Science has yet to show whether this is a genetic defect, or merely corrupt enculturation, though the lack of evidence for evil among other cultures points to something innately linked to whiteness. We should note that once empathy was understood to be the supreme moral virtue, white-skinned persons rushed to demonstrate that they were the supreme practitioners of this virtue, resulting in a performative, projected ‘empathy’ quite distinct from the real thing, and in fact rooted in violent colonialist instincts for total subsumption of the subject. This installation attempts to re-contextualize whiteness by forcefully subjectivizing and de-centering the seemingly innate sense of false objectivity white persons feels entitled to project onto the world, here seen through the example of Mary T. Lathrap’s famous poem.
“Huh,” I said. “Neat.”