Racial Empathy

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Empathy among/between racial groups in the United States To be able to understand how empathy works between a certain group of people, it is necessary to know what empathy means. I found an interesting definition of empathy, as a crucial component of the helping relationship, a need to understand people ' distress, and to provide supportive interpersonal communication. Empathy is the ability to recognize the emotions of others. Empathy does not mean that we live other people’ emotions, but it means that we understand other people ' emotions from our experiences. Empathy does not mean to cancel your personality, but to understand how people perceive the reality. It is the ability to read information coming through nonverbal channels. In this …show more content…

Therefore, universities have had to implement new measures that address racial insensitivity expressed by White students. According to Chao et al. (2015), in college campuses, student of color can hear every day racism comments, therefore, to create college campuses with a healthy climate, educators and psychologists must find ways to promote justice attitudes among non-Latino White students and foster racial empathy for targets of racism (p.95). They said: “White empathy refers to White students’ expression of empathy through a deep understanding of their fellow students’ experiences, especially those of racial and ethnic minority students suffering from racism”, (p.95). Educators and counselors must work together in helping students to better understand how to appreciate differences between groups. Chao et al., underlined in their study that to be able to understand individuals’ perceptions toward diversity, researchers have proposed the concept of openness to diversity (OTD), which refers to the appreciation of similarities and differences across cultural groups (p. 96). Open to diversity (OTD) also involves students ' interest to know more and more about unfamiliar cultures without assumptions. They said that “OTD moderates the relationship between White racial identity and White Empathy”, which means that when White students have greater OTD, they may be more likely to understand how minority students experience racism and when White students are less open to diversity, they may also be less willing to consider different perspectives on racial issues (p.

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