I wrote an article a while back called “The Importance of the Empathetic Imagination.” My contention was, and remains, that it is of great value to attempt to imagine the experience of others, even if we fall short of actually knowing what it’s like to be them. That this is the crucial difference between white people who are trying to live with an awareness of racism and how it affects the lives of black people now and historically, and white people wearing MAGA hats. One group will go to the Museum of African-American history and try to imagine what it would be like to stand on a auction black, one group won’t even know the museum exists, much less step foot in it.
Those of us who try to imagine ourselves with the broken heart of Emmet Till’s mother, or what it might be like to a Guatemalan child in detention, or put ourselves in the shoes of that homeless person we walk by — this willingness represent the admission ticket to the possibility of much more profound change. The trying matters. That also includes trying to imagine the experience of those who repel us, the MAGA-hatters trapped in their tribalistic thinking. It doesn’t mean not holding them to account for it, just acknowledging the possibility that, raised in a bath of the same circumstances, we would almost certainly be just as small-minded and afraid of the “other.”
I think the author failed to ask herself whether she ever asked a white friend if she could call her “sis.” I bet not. It is not something white women generally don’t do with each other. Any if they do — they don’t have to ask. If someone is genuinely like a sister to you, you just say “she is like a sister to me” others. But black women tend to use “sister” and “brother” as and affirmation of their mutual experience as African-Americans. Some of us, as white people, may envy the sense of intimacy we witness between them, while thinking that our disgust at the nods between two MAGA-hat wearers somewhat grants us a waiver into honorary, temporary blackness. It does not.