When I reflect on my experiences tutoring low-income students in high school in India, ironically, I reminisce about the times spent away from textbooks and blackboards. I call to mind our nature walks, spending time on the stairwell listening to sixth graders gossip about their friends, and the warm feeling spreading through my body when they signed the cast around my broken leg. At that time, I thought I couldn’t do it any better. I’d navigated around socioeconomic differences and gone on to form deep relationships. The children entrusted me with their thoughts and opinions. I thought I was profoundly practicing empathy, defined as the ability to “be aware of, be sensitive to and experience the thoughts and feelings of others without having them objectively communicated to me,” according to Merriam-Webster. I was, but only in the traditional sense.
Now, as I sift through bodies of work that contemplate what “good community service” is, I wonder if it is simply enough to be kind at a human level. Of course, being empathetic, in the traditional sense, is at the forefront of qualities required for service. Donahue and Plaxton-Moore identify “empathy” as a critical disposition for effective community service and service learning (Donahue et al.). However, I believe that relying on “empathy” in the traditional sense is insufficient for breaking down oppressive social structures and creating a pathway for social change. Hence, I argue for an “informed sensitivity” approach, which not only considers our community partners at a “human” level but also addresses their issues as products of social forces. This approach suggests that genuine “empathy in service” can not stand alone without educating ourselves on systemic forces and gauging our community partners and ourselves in relation to existing power structures.
My stance on the importance of being “informed” to be genuinely empathetic stems from Tania Mitchell’s paper that compares “critical” and “traditional” models of service learning (Mitchell). Mitchell states traditional service-learning is a service model “without attention to systems of inequality.” Volunteers who tend to follow this approach, such as me during my high school days, are likely to approach “empathy” in its traditional sense without understanding the community in the context of “systemic forces” and the “institutionalized nature of oppression.” On the other hand, volunteers who approach service with a critical mindset are “unapologetic in their aim to dismantle structures of injustice.” I predict that proponents of this approach seek to be sensitive in the “right” way, educating themselves as much as possible and not settling with being simply kind.
Some may wonder about the problem with being just “kind” but uninformed. For example, I developed a deep connection with the children I worked with in high school despite not attempting to educate myself. For one, as volunteers, we can not truly understand our community partners without recognizing the structural forces that shape their lives. When I start helping Black and Latino high school students with their college essays, I doubt I could be truly sensitive to the stories they may tell me unless I understand the racial and socioeconomic class dynamics of students in Los Angeles. Furthermore, I also argue that the more social differences there are between us volunteers and the community partner, the more we need to educate ourselves through reading and dialogue to understand their situation as closely as possible. It may have been easier to understand the children I worked with back home, as we shared racial, linguistic, and numerous cultural similarities. However, I share much less in common with high schoolers from Downtown Los Angeles. As Mitchell argues, critical service (and informed sensitivity, too) must involve theorizing and unpacking the structural forces that cause these social differences in the first place.
It is hard to deny that when doing community service, we well up with emotions. When editing resumes for three Rough Riders (the mascot for students from Theodore Roosevelt High School), I sympathized with the children who had to babysit their siblings while balancing a part-time job and schoolwork. Similarly, I remember experiencing commiseration for the fact that the children in India were battling several barriers to education; domestic abuse, and financial stress, for example. I don’t think condoning myself for it is wise — sympathy and pity are natural human emotions, especially when we see others in distress. However, we must be vigilant in understanding where these feelings come from and not letting “empathy” or “sensitivity” transform into feeling bad for our community partners. Having delved deeper into privilege and power structures, I have learned that sympathy and pity may deter us from embodying a disposition of “informed sensitivity” and could be perpetrating hierarchy. Feeling pity for our community partners is driven by differences in social privilege, which refers to advantages and benefits a person may receive because they belong to a particular identity group. By “feeling bad” for a certain community, we risk creating an“us-them dichotomy” unless we pay attention to the root causes of these differences in privilege and work to break down power structures (Robinson). As somebody who is not a first-generation college goer and not from a low-income working-class family, I automatically hold more unearned privilege than the three girls whose resumes I was editing. When I ‘felt bad” for these girls, I realized I was unconsciously widening the distance between myself and their community. In my small way, I was contributing to the subordination of low-income students in relation to myself. I don’t mean to say it is wrong to feel sympathy. In fact, a paper argues that sympathy is crucial to service since the emotions it induces drives people to help in the first place (Froyum). I simply believe that it’s important and almost an interesting exercise to try and recognize where our feelings stem from. I’ve started to recognize these fleeting thoughts of pity, which are easy to forget and push away. As service learners, we must learn to differentiate between “pity” and being empathetic, and I believe that informing ourselves on privilege and power structures is crucial for this.
As volunteers, we are frequently blinded by our power and privilege. We often take for granted that our community partners are also humans with hopes, goals, and dreams. Multiple times, my professor has asked us, “What context, other than in service or charity, could you possibly see a homeless person interacting with a privileged person?”. It is unsurprising that we, as volunteers, primarily think of the disadvantaged (people of color, the working class, unhoused people, and people with disabilities) in contexts of victimization and distress. However, this is only a single story. More often than not, I need to remind myself that people who are disadvantaged are not mere victims of an oppressive system. They have the cultural tools available to fight for their own justice. This idea is encapsulated in Tara Yosso’s “Community Cultural Wealth” model, which is built upon the premise that oppressed communities hold forms of cultural wealth that they can garner to empower themselves (Yosso and Burciaga). I believe it is worth adopting the values this theory is built on — that people of color and the working class all have unique tools and skills (for example, language, community, aspirations) that are as respectable as more traditional forms of wealth. For me, understanding this is especially important as I start working with high school students on writing essays about themselves. For example, I probably would not have placed “speaking my native language fluently” under “Skills” in a resume, but being bilingual may be extremely important to somebody else. When doing service, we must be open to other people’s strengths and skills. Reading this theory may also humble one slightly, as it did for me. It reminded me that as a volunteer, my role is to assist these children in better accessing their existing tools. Not to make up for their lack of assets. Learning about community cultural wealth and educating ourselves on the steps the community takes and has already taken should be at the forefront of our aim to be “informed.”
Nevertheless, we can not limit ourselves to academic journals, third-person op-eds, and newspaper articles to “inform” ourselves of our community partner. This promotes one of the very harms that we are trying to abolish: magnifying one single story. Bickford and Reynolds argued that “the challenge is to create relationships that neither ignore the realities of social inequality in our society nor attempt to artificially homogenize all people in the service-learning environment.” (Bickford and Reynolds) After building up a detailed understanding of the community’s background and the social forces affecting it, we must ensure that we attempt to understand individual stories and experiences. Having read numerous articles on educational inequality and third-person accounts of schooling experiences for the Hispanic community, I now understand the issues that affect the people I will be working with. However, the quote from above got me thinking about how I could balance my academic research with reading stories and articles written by Latino high school students. So, I have been turning to Sounds of Freedom: Beats on Concrete, a compilation of personal narratives written by students of Manual Arts High School, one of the schools 826LA works with. I remember scrolling through the document when I first opened it, looking at all the pictures of the students, and reading the short autobiographies about their hobbies and interests. I read about a girl who loved playing an instrument, and a smile would creep up on my face because we share something in common. Then, I would turn to their narrative, a story about a significant event in their life, and I would also realize that there are so many social differences between us. But reading individual stories reminded me that we share experiences, which are just as crucial as being sensitive to the social differences that separate us.
One may wonder how an “informed sensitivity” approach contributes better towards long-term social change, more so than simply being empathetic in the traditional sense. Mitchell talks about fostering a “critical consciousness” to actively work to “redistribute power and to adopt a “social change orientation” while also being able to forge “authentic relationships.” Mitchell is working under the premise that while one person cannot break down deep-rooted power structures, individual volunteers and the dispositions they bring in do matter. I believe this is where I would suggest that an “informed sensitivity” approach is more substantial in terms of the individual work a volunteer would have to put in, the depth coupled with a deeper understanding of relationships between the server and the servee, and attention to macro and micro experiences in the community. As I prepare to start helping high schoolers edit their college essays, I am attempting to take this “informed sensitivity approach” — to be sensitive but not pitiful and to go in with a broad understanding of structural issues that affect these young adults while also being open to hearing individual stories.
Works Cited
