Pursuing an ethic of empathy in journalism: A Blog

In To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border, Esther de Waal (2001) writes of the Celtic practice of bringing the self to conscious attention when crossing into a sacred space such as a church, a point in time she calls a threshold moment. Such an individual creates a moment of stillness that allows him or her “to enter into that space kept empty in the heart for the Word of God” (2-3). Such a crossing is both literal and metaphorical, similar, she says, to the way in which one understands both the literal nature of and the symbolic value of a river (5), both a natural formation and a signifier of depth and breadth, fertility and movement. De Waal points as well toward the Japanese practice of “stand[ing] on the lintel in order to remove the shoes worn outside in the street” (2). This approach to entering the home “forces a very deliberate and conscious way of standing still, even if for only a moment, in order to show respect for the difference between two spaces, the outer and the inner; the preparation for the encounter with another person, another household” (2). Stacia Keogh, performer and teacher, defines a threshold moment as a turning point, a moment when a person has “faced a difficult decision or life event” or has stood in the midst of a “surprising pivot which changed [his or her] life forever” (https://www.storyprez.co.uk/threshold-moments-where-the-best-stories-are-found/).

Threshold moments allow for something new to come into being–perhaps something so seemingly simple as a moment of peace. We mask at my university. I have been and will continue to follow our masking mandate until the committee charged with making Covid-related decisions decides otherwise. They’re good people who are basing their decisions on the best available evidence. I don’t envy them their job. But people, many of them our students, some of them staff or faculty, are getting restless. I understand that restlessness. Nonetheless, as students and staff at our university, they know, as do I, that they are to follow the mandate until it’s lifted. At this point, though, I am seeing, feeling, and at times engaging with their anger, an anger that’s going to go unresolved, it would seem, until the committee making the tough decisions decides that we can all stuff our masks in our desk drawers.

Here’s what I have observed: Because those opposed to masking have not surrendered to the moment, they find it difficult to attend to other parts of their lives. If a student sits in my classroom, angry throughout the entire class period that they are having to follow a rule with which they disagree, they’re not focused on the lecture, their peers’ questions, or the discussion. The same might be said, I suppose, about someone whose focus becomes concentrated on the person two rows ahead who isn’t bothering to mask properly. Once it’s been jumpstarted, the anger commands an outsized portion of the individual’s capacity to focus. Everything becomes secondary to the matter of masking/not masking, and the point of their being in the classroom is ceded to the anger. Anger isn’t always a bad thing. It can, at times, compel us to act on behalf of a good cause. But right now, in this moment, during this pandemic, it seems to be a catalyst for nothing but more and greater anxiety.

I’m as capable as the next person of obsessing about things I don’t like or agree with, but I simultaneously know that to obsess is to cede my emotional wellbeing to, more often than not, things that aren’t–and never will be–all that important to me. If we want to increase our attentional capacity, we need to find a way to focus on what’s important, to think about how we’re employing–or not–our human capacity to be mindful and attentive. The issue of masking is wreaking havoc with our ability to pay attention to the myriad moments that make up our days. The mask has become a threshold of its own, a metaphor for choice, a portal to one way of being or another.

We could come, or should, to the places we inhabit on any given day in much the same way that we enter a church or settle into watching the sun drop below the horizon. As we open a book, walk into a classroom, sit down in front of our desk, we should mark the moment of transition, empty ourselves of noise, make room for possibility. We can set distractions aside and choose mindfulness.

The profession of journalism is in something of a pickle these days. Its practitioners are covering news and ferreting out and disseminating facts that are deeply connected to questions of morality. Back in February, a young reporter named Lewis Wallace started shining some light on this relationship, and even suggested that the profession start rethinking the way it does its work. He scared up a fair amount of journalistic angst. When New York Times or Washington Post reporters write columns, they can express their thoughts about the morality of myriad complex issues: the president’s decision to ban individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States; the ramifications of a wall on vulnerable individuals who cross the border illegally, the immorality of denying health care to poor people. On the op-ed page reporters can question the decency of legislation that stands between a poor child and his or her right to a free breakfast. Continue reading It’s a FACT: White Supremacy is Immoral

Recently, while teaching a course that focused on journalism and the importance of one’s employing an ethic of empathy, my students and I read and studied Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A national correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates is well known for his analytical and opinion pieces. His book, a letter to his 15-year-old son, is at once intimate and expansive, his attempt to explain what it means to grow up black in this world and, in particular, in the United States of America. He expresses his hopes and fears for his son, who is coming of age in a culture within which racism persists.

What does it mean, he pushes the reader to wonder, to have to tell your child, when that child is old enough to understand, that there are those who think themselves superior–and others therefore lesser–because of the color of their skin? Coates wants not only his son but all others who read his work to resonate with his belief, his deep and personal understanding, that the American Dream “rests on the bodies of black people.” 

At this moment in our history, we are witnessing the bold resurgence of white supremacists, among them Richard Spencer, a leading voice for the alt-right. Spencer, at a rally in a federal building in D.C. this past November, quoted Nazi propaganda and proclaimed that America belongs to white people. He and others extended their arms to salute Trump, shouting, “Heil, Trump!”

Every time I visualize this scene in my mind’s eye I am overcome with grief. And rightly so. But this I believe: Their voices will not carry the day. For now, though, their presence in this world stands as evidence of just how far the human race has yet to go to become a species defined by love, not hate. Most of us are smarter and better than Richard Spencer and his ilk. We’ll persist and we’ll triumph.

I hope my students enjoyed reading Coates as much as I did. I hope they found themselves empathizing with his feelings and his perspective. Empathy is never easy, but when, for example, a young white woman reads the work of a black man who is a father, an intellectual, a realist, and someone who has known the bottomless pain of oppression, she must be willing to open herself not only to feeling as he feels and to taking on his perspective as her own, but also to acknowledging her own biases and assumptions. Reading Coates becomes, if one lets it, a journey into self-examination.

I resonated with Coates’s perspective because I encountered in his words and in the deep love that motivated them our shared humanity. Coates’s book–his letter–is a call to our deepest, best selves. It is an invitation to become acutely conscious of the interior life of another human being and the history he represents. It is an invitation to understand and internalize his perspective by connecting and resonating with his concern, his pain, his hope, and most of all his love. It has taken up permanent residence in my mind and in my heart.

 

Prairie Chickens Dance  — Here in South Dakota, the prairie chicken has seen its habitat disappear as the land, acre by acre, has been plowed under. Many times, my husband and I have watched the chickens perform their spring mating ritual on the rough ground of the prairie. They dance for a future that we must protect on their behalf.

Compassion is integral to the creation of an ethical life; nonetheless, the institution of journalism has worried for more than a century that compassion might somehow provoke the profession’s downfall. And it might—but not because we have ever actually let loose its imagined power to wreak havoc. Quite the contrary. The profession has largely stifled its promise—the potential to strengthen the quest for truth—through a dogged dedication to objectivity.

But journalism, despite itself, is evolving, as is a multidisciplinary theory of empathy, one that contains elements and principles essential to good journalism. In the past few decades, a body of journalists has become the moral compass of an institution deeply in need of one: the press. These individuals reflect in their work an ethic of empathy and a respect for the principle that grounds any democratic system: the life, liberty, and happiness of the many must be protected. A couple years ago David Finkel, Washington Post, skyped with 10 or so students enrolled in a course I was teaching on the relationship between empathy and journalism. At the end of our conversation, Finkel summed up in five words his motivation as a storyteller who uses the narrative form: “The world needs more witnesses,” he said. The students wrote Finkel’s words in their notebooks, as did I. Through his words he evoked a basic truth essential to the evolution of humanity—and therefore journalism: People must diminish the distance that exists between self and other.

Because my students had been studying Finkel’s work, they knew just how closely he had taken himself to soldiers of the 2-16 in Iraq. Aware of those who argue that the narrative form invites subjective bias, Finkel emphasized that reportage must undergird every sentence in a narrative work, that the reader must be able to connect the writer’s interpretation, as well as his or her own, to verifiable facts, strong sourcing, and unfiltered observations. We were moved not only by the power of Finkel’s words but by the tone in Finkel’s voice: an amalgamation of conviction, purpose, and hope. The conviction that drives Finkel—the need to witness, the obligation that one human being ought to feel toward another—drives many writers today. Journalists are and should be humanitarians and storytellers who can, through their work, alleviate suffering and promote change in the world of the 21^st century. Journalists must be witnesses, and they must be witnesses that gain understanding of the other through connection.

For information about JBL: http://www.augie.edu/faculty-7