Empathy — “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this.”

Sympathy — “an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other”

So says the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

I was thinking quite a bit about these words today — the day on which hundreds of “Justice for Trayvon Martin” rallies took place across the United States.  I thought about how my wife, my brother-in-law, my wife’s whole family, and good friends of mine — all Black people — have experienced things throughout their lives that I have never experienced.

My skin color has never led anyone to:

Follow me around a store

Bump into me as if I wasn’t there

Cross the street to avoid me

Refuse to let me into their taxi

Believe that I was about to commit a crime

These incidents are so far from what I’ve experienced in my lifetime and so far outside the pale that it seems hard to believe.  But, at the same time, I am not so naive to disbelieve.  Rather, I know that they are true.  I know that, sadly, the human capacity to discriminate is seemingly boundless.   Human history is filled with examples of this proposition.

Yet, even now, as the President referred to in his recent speech, there are those who perhaps don’t understand why Blacks and African-Americans are particularly upset by the Trayvon Martin incident, why they are taking it so personally.  I know why they don’t understand the level of upset.  How can you understand someone truly unless you (as Bill Clinton used to say) feel their pain?  Unless, as the saying goes “you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins.”

And, that’s when it occurred to me — so many of the problems we have, so much of the cause of the lack of respectful discourse, is because we have insufficient empathy and sympathy.  Pick your issue, it’s true in every instance.  The Middle East Conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the paradigm of this phenomenon.  And, in this specific instance involving Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, it is clear that the reason for the nastiness of the debate surrounding the Zimmerman verdict is that too many people who look like Zimmerman (or look like me, for that matter) are unwilling (or unable) to have empathy and sympathy for people who look like Trayvon Martin and his parents.  But if they did (or could) they would see that when people are talking about “Justice for Trayvon Martin” they’re not just talking about justice for Trayvon or for his family.  They’re talking about “justice” in a much bigger context – for all the people out there who feel or felt as if they’ve been in Trayvon’s shoes the night he was killed.

Which brings me back to my wife, my in-laws, and my friends and the anecdotes they’ve shared with me about prejudice and discrimination that they’ve experienced and the feelings it has engendered.  That my family and loved ones have suffered such indignities makes me ill.  That anyone has, makes me upset, but to know that my family and friends have been on the receiving end of such treatment makes the pain that much more acute. And, it makes me concerned for my son, who is Biracial and very well may find himself on the receiving end of these sorts of experiences.  I hope that the World is changing fast enough that it never does, but if that should not be the case, and my son has one of these awful experience where he is profiled simply for how he looks, I hope that I (and others) will have the sympathy and empathy to comfort him and say and do the right things in response.