My husband is watching "When They See Us", based on the actual case of the Central Park Five, in the living room. I started watching it with him, but I got so overwhelmed by feelings of rage, sadness, injustice, and pain that I had to leave the room. I feel like a coward sometimes when I'm unable to watch certain things because the feelings of pain become too strong. I've been highly emphatic since I was a child - it doesn't take much for me to step inside someone else's skin and take on the emotions they may be experiencing. Just the other day, I met with my spiritual director and we were discussing my struggles with empathy; I'm grateful that I have a high level of empathy but it certainly feels like a blessing and a curse. There's no way for me to dial down, let along turn off, the emotion overload, particularly when it comes to suffering. I don't know how not to feel the suffering of others.
The issue of race is particularly unnerving. I grew up in a small, rural town that was predominantly white. To be an immigrant and minority impressed upon me the importance of not just fitting in but acceptance; to succeed, I needed to - no, I must - be part of the dominant culture. I remember being vulnerable, being on guard, learning to fend for myself and for my family by mastering English. That was the greatest defense and offense - to have a voice, to speak up, to explain, to challenge. Language was my greatest weapon.
In my desire to be accepted, I always envisioned myself marrying an American - a white American at that. Becoming fully acculturated by marrying into the dominant culture. God has a sense of humor, however, and I ended up falling in love and marrying a non-American - and an immigrant at that. A beautiful, brown man whose first language is not English.
I've noticed all those dormant feelings of protectiveness reawakening during this first year of marriage: that little child warrior in me who had grown accustomed to explaining things to my parents, serving as the translator, yelling at those who had wrongly assumed they could bully my parents because they didn't speak English fluently. My husband is a grown man who is very adept at taking care of himself. But I can't help but feel those guardian tendencies, particularly as he navigates a land where he will be perceived a certain way by the color of his skin, a perception he may not be accustomed to having grown up in a different place - a place where he is the dominant and not the minority. Just thinking about it makes me want to protect him somehow from arrows that may be wrongfully flung at him.
How different this world would be if we knew more deeply what it means to step inside someone else's skin? How differently would we make laws and policies, construct systems of justice? How differently would we debate topics like gun reform, abortion, and civil rights? How differently would our public conversations be shaped if we focused less on "My rights" and more on "Your pain"?
