empathy in Mississippi

 

Empathy in Mississippi 2020

 

As new and improved fascism ascents in  the United States of America, you might notice an increase in pleas for empathy.  For example, the Mississippi Humanities Council is currently seeking contributions to support its Anti-Racism Reading Shelf list.  According to Stuart Rockoff, MHC Executive Director, the list "includes contemporary Mississippi writers like Angie Thomas, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, whose fiction and memoir help inspire empathy in White readers with their honest accounts of the experience of Black Americans" (email, September 8, 2020).  Why should anyone who knows anything about what has transpired in the State of Mississippi since 1817 believe a reading list will cultivate empathy?  How much empathy did a white Mississippian's reading of UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN or BLACK BOY produce? How many white Mississippians have cultivated genuine empathy from reading Margaret Walker,  Charlie Braxton, Sterling D. Plumpp, Natasha Trethewey and C. Liegh McInnis?  Perhaps a few of them who faithfully  attended the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration did inculcate empathy, but we do not have empirical data to confirm such a psychological transformation.

 

I'd wager that most white Mississippians have empathy for their white ids and egos and that an insignificant number of them will embrace the discomfort, reading list notwithstanding, of deconstructing  and eradicating their vernacular racism. I'd also wager that few black Mississippians will be bamboozled by rhetorical pleas for empathy.  The hard lessons of history have taught them that empathy is a feature of Greek mythology, the story of Tantalus.  As the poet Bettina Judd recently noted in remarks on her poem "on empathy," the failures of empathy provide a conundrum for Black folks, and perhaps discomfort is real and empathy is fantasy.  I am not certain that some black Mississippians who read William Faulkner, Minrose Gwin, Larry Brown, Willie Morris, Ellen Douglas, Eudora Welty and Richard Ford are involved in a quest for empathy.  They are seeking reasonable  explanations for discomfort.

 

Rockoff's appeal for contributions led me to consult the Demographic Statistical Atlas of the United State  ---- https://stasticalatlas.com/state/Mississippi/Race-and-Ethnicity

The estimated ethnic distribution in Mississippi is

56.6% white

37.9% black

2.88% Hispanic

and the remaining 2.7% is Asian, Mixed, and Other.

I come to the tentative conclusion that if 1.05% of white Mississippians  embraced anti-racism and genuine empathy for anything, we would witness a miracle.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 9, 2020