On the public policy side, I have begun to wonder if empathy-based theories of social change get in the way of the goals of social justice movements. That is,

On the public policy side, I have begun to wonder if empathy-based theories of social change get in the way of the goals of social justice movements. That is, social justice movements are pining after something they cannot achieve through empathy, and are distracted from their goals as a result. A rather pedestrian example, I was having a discussion about transit planning with a group of people. Despite the less than enthusiastic reception transit gets from typical middle class white people, there's still a sense that the system is biased towards them, and doesn't serve communities of color/etc as well. The modern urbanist sensibility here is to have community engagement, neighborhood meetings, etc. All very grassroots. But who shows up to these things? Older white educated people mostly, usually with negative opinions to share. In this discussion people were very concerned about how we could get more representation from other communities, how we could hold more of these meetings in relevant neighborhoods, at times when working people could attend, etc. The underlying logic of this participatory model is basically empathetic. People individually express themselves so that they can influence each other and the decision makers. They do this through empathy. The decision makers are generally more white, more privileged, more educated (and we can't expect to recruit more uneducated urban planners!) These people will be more receptive to perspectives coming from people like them. The response is often to increase the participation, be more inclusive, broaden the perspective. But minorities will always lose out, increasing participation doesn't disrupt that empathy bias. You can have more meetings in neighborhoods with minorities, and the white people even in those neighborhoods will still out-influence the minorities. Can we fix the empathy problem in policing by getting more minorities on the force? That has not seemed very effective. Can we create better services for minorities by listening to their needs and responding? Eh, the best I've seen is people feel listened to, which is too often the substitute for real change. So I wonder if instead we stop relying on empathy in these circumstances, as emotionally attached as we are on the idea of empathy. Going back to the original example, if we want to design a decent transit system we need to ditch the community feedback and go to data. In that model everyone is counted the same. Hidden bias isn't enough to create a model where a black person as 3/5 of a white person. And of course people still select models based on feedback, and that feedback will be biased, but it's way better than what we have now. Instead of trying to fix bias in order to fix social injustice, I think we'd do better constructing systems that remove the effect of bias in those places – which is the opposite of what most social justice advocates intend when they suggest we address the "root" of the problem.