Empathy as Culture Shock

[su_note note_color=”#d5d5d5″ text_color=”#91201f”]The following is a reprint from Volume 3, Issue 1 of Christ and Pop Culture Magazine: “The Necessary Sacrifice of Empathy,” available for free for a limited time. You can subscribe to Christ and Pop Culture Magazine by becoming a member and you’ll receive a host of other benefits as well.[/su_note]

For those in the majority, learning to empathize with minorities’ experiences entails voluntary culture shock. It’s disorienting and even distressing, but it’s necessary for neighbor-love.

When I turned 21, I was wrapping up a summer internship with Mika CDC, a Christian community development corporation based in Orange County. In just a few days, I would move back to my college’s dorms two miles away from my Hispanic host family’s apartment, where I had spent the summer. On one of those last afternoons, I handed out birthday hot dogs and tres leches cake, celebrating with my neighbors on Shalimar Drive, a community with a reputation for crime rather than cute kids and birthday parties.

I studied cultural anthropology at Vanguard University, a small Christian college in Costa Mesa, California. The professors in my department connected many of their students to hands-on opportunities all around the world; for some of us, the opportunities were local.

To empathize with someone who has had a very different experience than you—in the same nation, same state, same city—can be disorienting, displacing, and distressing.Mika CDC works in neighborhoods of Westside Costa Mesa that are almost 100% Hispanic. A distressing 76.5% of families in this target community have income levels categorized by HUD as low, very low, or extremely low. Orange County is a place of extremes, though: according to the 2010 census, the nearby Coto de Caza has a median income of $169,176. Orange County is well known from reality shows, movies, and one soapy teenage sitcom. (A billboard in the heart of Orange County intoned, “The OC: It’s Nothing Like Where You Live.”)

The same week I took my first Intro to Cultural Anthropology class, I made the subject my major. My professor, Dr. Jamie Huff, blew open students’ preconceived categories and made us think hard about culture, people, and God. The first in-class exercise I volunteered for was to list out all the different racial groups in the world. I tried to stick to geographical regions, and I learned something invaluable when he told us all I was wrong. There is only one human race, though there are many different ethnicities. In learning about culture, we learned that ethnicity necessarily shapes people’s actions, experiences, and treatment, wherever they live.

To learn about cultural norms, we had to purposely break one. Dr. Huff offered this: Board an elevator in a crowded place. Hit the button but then turn around and stare at everyone. What norms did you just break? How do you feel?

In time, my education went much deeper than the awkward breaking of cultural norms. I loved all of it. I am white and grew up in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. I was being given eyes to see the diversity of Southern California and the knowledge and desire to try to understand the rich layers of human experience in communities so different from ones I had known.

I came to understand something that would change my worldview forever: In learning another culture, especially one situated in my own country and even state, my empathy and love for my new friends was akin to culture shock. It was an exercise in getting on the elevator, turning around, and staring my assumptions and experiences in the face.

Many who travel cross-culturally try to learn something about the place’s culture before the visit. We learn basic history, memorize basic phrases, keep an open mind. But we don’t often turn that interpretive lens on our own country’s minority groups—especially if we do not belong to one of them.

To use a familiar metaphor, to examine the layers of our own culture is to be a fish suddenly paying attention to water. To look at your culture through the eyes of a member of a minority group—their place within our country, their history and experiences—can cause major culture shock. To empathize with someone who has had a very different experience than you—in the same nation, same state, same city—can be disorienting, displacing, distressing.

In other words, it’s hard. But it is deeply Christian. Romans 12:15–16 says that in the church we are to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.” And while the primary focus is on relationships within the church, the command to love our neighbor should stir us to similar humility and empathy with non-Christians.

Empathizing with the experiences of others, especially others with less power and privilege, is a God-honoring exercise in replacing our fictions. The OC: it’s nothing like where you live.

Mika’s approach is to equip local leaders, to strengthen relationships among neighbors, to work together toward a shared vision for their neighborhood, and to connect the community to outside resources and opportunities. This vision is fueled by their founding verse, Micah 6:8:

He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

During my internship, I lived with a young Hispanic family on Shalimar Drive and helped with summer youth programs. I also had the distinct privilege of accompanying my coworker Jen as she met with a few women on Center Street, a neighborhood Mika was just beginning to connect with. Jen was Mika’s liaison to a group of visionary Hispanic moms who would come to name their neighborhood committee “Manos a la Obra,” essentially “Hands to the Work.” While sitting in these meetings with Jen, I would grow to know and love these women who saw a great need for tutoring and homework help on Center Street and who wanted to partner with Mika to make it happen.

That summer I became accustomed to home visits—sometimes planned, sometimes drop-in—to families that were involved in their neighborhood and with Mika. I would listen quietly, as Jen and Mika founder Crissy got to know people and news in the community or checked in on pressing matters they knew were important to a family. I began to understand a community that faced economic pressure and a heavy-handed city government that seemed bent on hindering rather than helping its Hispanic residents. I came to know people who wanted to connect their relationally fractured neighborhood so that they might work together for change: ESL classes, a unified front in reporting and responding to crime, Bible studies, tutoring centers, fixing street lights. I grew to love Hispanic hospitality. I would be introduced to people I didn’t know—I was just an intern! I didn’t grow up just “dropping in” on people! But if there was food, I’d be offered it. And if I saw the person we visited again, I’d be welcomed.

A few months after my internship ended, a local church partnered with Manos a la Obra and Mika to help make the tutoring center a reality, and I was asked to be the initial coordinator. The Center, named El Centro de Esperanza, was located in an apartment in the middle of Center Street. I helped schedule volunteers, planned programs, opened the center daily, tutored, and started doing my own home visits. When my junior year ended, I moved back into the Shalimar neighborhood with some friends from school. I loved working with tutors from outside the neighborhood and seeing them revise their perceptions of neighborhoods they had only heard about. I hung out after the center closed and ate dinner with families. I did my laundry at the laundromat and chatted with my neighbors.

During this time, I began one of the harder assignments of my major, a theory paper that had to look at something “in real life.” I chose to write about how the Hispanic community of Westside Costa Mesa functioned despite a hostile majority environment—a true slice of Orange County. So I worked alongside my Hispanic neighbors while applying anthropological theory to city council meetings, editorials, letters to the editor, and bits of Orange County history which sometimes made my skin crawl with their undisguised hatred and racism.

I realized that my experience growing up white was confoundingly different than that of my Hispanic friends. I came to understand that I occupied a position of privilege and had never known it. This assignment taught me to stop and listen when minorities share their experiences, speak up, and protest.

What I learned with Mika changed me. The gospel reconciles us to God through Christ and to each other as members of His one family. And the gospel gives birth to love that seeks others’ good, inside the church and out. One way to seek the good of others who are less privileged and powerful is simply to listen to and learn from their experiences—and then to let those experiences change the way you see your own.

If you’re a white American, you might not think of yourself as privileged, but you are. And if you want to think rightly about your own ethnicity, one of the best ways is to humbly, patiently seek to learn about someone else’s.

When God gives you the opportunity to befriend neighbors or fellow church members of a different ethnic background, have the courage to acknowledge your differences. Have the humility to ask questions about others’ experiences and the kindness to listen hard to the answers. Those answers may force you to re-evaluate aspects of your own upbringing and your assumptions about the way the world works. Those answers may obligate you to work in new ways for the good of others.

Cultivating this kind of empathy doesn’t necessarily mean moving into a new neighborhood, but does means opening ourselves up to re-thinking what we thought we understood. It means being willing to let others’ experiences change how you think about yours.

I brought my two daughters back to Center Street last summer. El Centro de Esperanza is run by neighborhood volunteers now, and the partner church’s financial assistance decreases yearly as Manos a la Obra grows more financially independent. Tears came to my eyes as I saw the groups of kids working with new tutors, the center still busy and thriving, and the dear women I knew welcoming me back and feeding my kids. My older daughter most enjoyed eating the blueberries Juanita gave her, but I hope in time she will walk humbly with the Lord, acting justly and loving mercy.

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out his graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.