Perspective Chapter: Through Empathizing to Co-Constructing Uniquenesses

Abstract

The traditional understanding of empathy as the capacity to sense and respond appropriately to another’s thinking and feeling effaces two related features of the important human events that his term attempts to name: their interpersonal nature and their culturally situated quality. Recent conceptual revisions helpfully respond to these effacements and position researchers to address a third feature of both traditional and revised versions of the construct; namely, empathy’s dependence on similarity. I address this feature here. I argue that empathy’s dependence on similarity makes it the penultimate rather than the decisive interpersonal event enabling humans to establish and maintain social and personal relations. Close relationships foreground not just similarities identified with the help of empathy but also differences; i.e., uniquenesses that are situation-specific and co-constructed in verbal/nonverbal talk. After describing what is meant by “co-,” “constructed,” and “uniquenesses,” I use close readings of three actual conversations to display how this process unfolds and to argue for the efficacy and utility of supplementing one’s focus on empathizing with close attention to how conversation partners co-construct uniquenesses.

1. Introduction

Some would call the conceptual history of the empathy construct “multi-faceted” and “rich,” and others would term it “vague,” “imprecise,” and even “confused.” In Rhetorica, Aristotle spoke extensively about pathos, the root of empathy as he cataloged audience emotions that the speaker should attempt to be aware of and appeal to in their efforts to persuade [1]. In modern Greek, however, εμπαθεια means prejudice, malevolence, or hatred. Titchener [2] introduced the term “empathy” into the English language in the early twentieth century as his translation of Einfuhlung or “feeling into,” which Theodor Lipps [3] had transformed from a concept in German esthetics into a central category in the philosophy of the human sciences. Today, academics across many additional disciplines treat empathy as a central concern in their conceptual, empirical, and clinical studies of emotional contagion, mirror neurons, gender differences, ethnography, altruism, moral development, prosocial behavior, and a range of brain health conditions (e.g., [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]). Empathy has even become a political term in the US as some of those on the right who are concerned about the fate of Christian morals inveigh against the liberal “gynocracy” that emasculates men by persuading them to affirm “such feminine virtues as empathy, fairness, and equality” [9].

1.1 Significance of the empathy construct

Virtually all these programs note the significance of empathy. It is understood to be the underlying psychological basis of humans’ social and moral nature, which within these programs means that empathy is “the main psychological mechanism enabling us to establish and maintain social relations” [8]. This psychological claim about the importance of relations with others complements the ontological position articulated by several influential philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that “So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being” [10]. More concretely, Mikhail Bakhtin observed.

Everything that pertains to me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the mouths of others (my mother, and so forth), with their intonation, in their emotional and value-assigning tonality…. Just as the body is formed initially in the mother’s womb (body), a person’s consciousness awakens wrapped in another’s consciousness [11].

Similarly, a central claim of Martin Buber’s philosophical anthropology is that relationships are fundamental to human wholeness, which means for him that the human studies must take seriously a “sphere of existence” Buber called “the between.” As he put it,

The fundamental fact of human existence is neither the individual as such nor the aggregate as such. Each, considered by itself, is a mighty abstraction…. What is peculiarly characteristic of the human world above all is that something takes place between one being and another the like of which can be found nowhere in nature…. It is rooted in one being turning to another as another, as this particular other being, in order to communicate with [them] in a sphere which is common to them but which reaches out beyond the special sphere of each. I call this sphere… the sphere of “between”. Though being realized in very different degrees, it is a primal category of human reality [12].

2. Two effacements

The fact that empathy is widely understood to be “the main psychological mechanism” powering an event so central to human existence means that conceptual problems with the construct take on outsized significance. Effacements are interpretations that obscure or obliterate vital parts of the whole that’s being interpreted. And unfortunately, two interrelated effacements undermine empathy’s conceptual coherence.

2.1 Relationship is effaced

The first is that the traditional understanding of empathy effaces the very human events that make it consequential. Empathy is widely understood to be a psychological capacity or mechanism that empowers one person to grasp another’s ideas and emotions, a capacity that belongs to an individual. But this capacity only takes on significance when it facilitates human contact. Empathic processes always implicate those who are the targets of empathy; the inclination to attend to others is impotent unless and until it is engaged. One result of this conceptual disconnect, as Hollan explains, is that

our observations and conceptualizations of these processes too often focus only on the person or persons attempting to empathize. Indeed, this is the point at which many empathic processes break down: the empathizer assuming that she has accurately resonated with another’s experience when the target of empathy knows or experiences otherwise [13].

In this way, empathy’s putatively prosocial capacity can become toxic. Health sciences researchers Weiner and Auster offer a specific example of the outcome of this individualizing, subject-object bias when they explain that clinical empathy “is experienced from the physician’s perspective not from the patient’s experience of his own world” [14]. To put it another way, empathy is understood to be constructed rather than co-constructed. And to the degree this happens, its products are potentially authoritarian, and can even be abusive.

2.2 Cultural context is effaced

The interrelated problem is that cultural context is also effaced. As Stueber explains,

Individual agents are always socially and culturally embedded creatures. Understanding other agents thus presupposes an understanding of the cultural context within which an agent functions. Moreover, in the interpretive situation of the human sciences, the cultural background of the interpreter and the person who has to be interpreted can be very different [8].

As an illustration of one difficulty that occurs when the importance of culture is overlooked, consider how often the person of color in a white supremacist culture like the one dominating the United States is required to suffer in silence as yet another well-meaning white person insists, “I know exactly how you feel.” Centuries of white privilege grounded in racist educational policies, theologies, legislation, social practices, law enforcement, and employment policies separate the life worlds of those of us who call ourselves white from the worlds inhabited by people of color so significantly that this claim can never be true [15].

3. Revisions of the construct

In response to problems created by these individualizing, ethnocentric effacements, Hollan and Throop [16] argue that empathy can only incompletely be understood as a psychological capacity; they contend that empathizing is a relational event, an emergent, culturally situated, dialogical process involving both conversation partners. As Throop puts it, empathy is “a process that is temporally arrayed, intersubjectively constituted, and culturally patterned” [17].

Research projects shaped by the methodologies of ethnography and conversation or discourse analysis clarify the significance of including in one’s understanding the elements of cultural context and relationality or co-construction. The latter group of researchers closely analyze recordings of actual conversations for the verbal and nonverbal practices and patterns through which partners make meaning together. This work takes seriously the claim that humans are social animals. Arundale describes one significant outcome that this recognition entails:

The smallest social system is a network of two persons and because communicating generates systemic interdependence among persons, the minimum unit of analysis necessary in accounting for human communicating is a dyad engaged in sequential inter- action [18].

Together, the works reviewed to this point argue for an understanding of empathizing that treats it as not simply a psychological mechanism but as a culturally situated, dialogical process facilitating contact that is often prosocial. These efforts to acknowledge the importance and complexity of the human events that the empathy construct attempts to name helpfully improve the coherence of the construct.

4. Based on similarity rather than difference

One additional feature of interpretations of the empathy construct highlights a further limitation and points toward a way of relating that can enhance the potential of what empathizing can help produce. This feature is that empathy as traditionally understood is based on similarity rather than difference. Personalist philosopher John Crosby argues,

My central affirmation is this: empathy and sympathy are typically based on my own self-experience; I find a path into the subjectivity of the other, not through the immediate givenness of his or her subjectivity, which is impossible, but through my own subjectivity [19].

Crosby argues that in order to empathize, for example, with a friend over the death of their last surviving parent, I must turn to my own similar experiences. This does not mean that I must also have experienced the death of both parents, although this would facilitate my empathizing. It does mean that I must draw, for example, on my own experiences with death of a family member, understanding of the feeling of being orphaned, and the realization that I am now the ultimate decision maker in my life, or, if I still have a living parent, on similar experiences in other close relationships. My resources for offering empathy reach just as far as my personal experience resembles that of my friend.

This is the sense in which empathy is based on similarity. Whether understood as a fundamental psychological capacity or a culturally situated dialogical process, empathizing requires the ability to access experiences one has that are similar to one’s conversation partner’s and to connect the two sets of experiences. In this way, although empathizing is certainly more individualized than social stereotyping, it does still include a grouping process that is central to social stereotyping; namely, one participant’s grouping their experiences so they can be related to relevant similar aspects of their conversation partner’s experiences.

5. Perception of difference: “She’s the one”

The importance of focusing on difference or uniqueness has been illustrated by varied scholars. In his 2009 tour de force, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Oxford neurobiologist and philosopher Iaian McGilchrist builds his analysis of 600 years of western history on a critical insight about human neurobiology. Like many neurobiologists, he argues that, although the left and right hemispheres of the human brain are connected in important ways, they nonetheless provide us with significantly different insights, values, and priorities. Most importantly, the right hemisphere empowers us to connect directly with the world and the left keeps us aloof from it. We need both, but, McGilchrist argues, since the thirteenth century the left has been made so dominant that humans are in danger of forgetting an important part of what makes us human.

He extensively cites quantitative, variable analytic research that validates the differing contact operations of the two hemispheres and demonstrates this bias toward left-hemisphere thinking. One crucial feature of this difference is that the left side of the brain powers stimulus generalization or grouping and the right side enables stimulus discrimination. His label for these two human orientation capabilities is “the impersonal versus the personal.” As he puts it, “the left hemisphere’s tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere’s is to identify individuals” [20]. McGilchrist emphasizes the significance of the intuitively obvious point that contact between unique persons is more personal than contact between those identified principally by their group memberships.

Early in the twentieth century, Buber highlighted this same feature of personal relationships. As Friedman explains, Buber “was centrally interested in uniqueness—that which makes a person or thing of value in itself, that which is unrepeatable…. This concept of uniqueness … is the first necessary step on Buber’s way to the philosophy of dialogue” [21].

At the end of Part I of his definitive work, I and Thou, Buber recapitulated the fundamental features of the two relationships he was describing—I-It and I-Thou—and said about the latter, “Or [the hu]man encounters being and becoming… always only one being…. Nothing else is present but this one…. Measure and comparison have fled” [22]. And in a later essay he explained that genuine dialog is brought into being when conversation partners perceive each other’s “wholeness … it means [they] perceive the dynamic center which stamps [the other’s] every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness” [23].

5.1 An opposite of social stereotyping

Everyday experience supports the distinction highlighted by McGilchrist and Buber. Empathizing often contributes to prosocial relationship development by enhancing interpersonal understanding, reducing destructive behaviors, and facilitating social solidarity. And when conversation partners are motivated to develop their relationship beyond mutual understanding and fellow feeling toward intimate, more fully personal connection, they often engage, in their own culturally informed ways, in co-constructing uniquenesses.

A key feature of important instances of this stage of personal and professional relationship development is the realization embodied in such expressions as, “She’s the one,” “They are the exactly right future partners,” or “I’ve never met anyone like him before.” Dating partners often continue spending time together because they have similar interests, food preferences, and political beliefs. But one proposes marriage to the other not mainly because he is another sushi-loving, Republican, Chicago Cubs fan like me, but because she wants to spend her life with this particular individual. Uniquenesses are at least as important as similarities. In the best cases, even prospective business partners connect when they are convinced, not just of each other’s general suitability but because each understands the other to be particularly and powerfully complementary, more so than any other partner option. Each choice reflects the perception of uniqueness, the features of a person or group that can be understood to anchor the end of a relationship continuum farthest away from the end labeled “social stereotyping.”

A social stereotype is a standardized conception about a group that is held in common by many and that can be used to attribute the group’s characteristics to an individual [24]. Sometimes this can be functional, for example, when a situation demands rapid evaluation. But, like most cognitive shortcuts, social stereotyping often creates problems. Specifically,

Stereotypes can facilitate intergroup hostility and give rise to toxic prejudices around sex, race, age, and multiple other social distinctions. Stereotypes are often used to justify injustice and discrimination, validate oppression, enable exploitation, rationalize violence, and shield corrupt power structures. Stereotype-based expectations and interpretations routinely derail intimate relationships, contaminate laws (and their enforcement), poison social commerce, and stymie individual freedom and achievement [25].

As McGilchrist noted [20], stimulus discrimination is the opposite of stimulus generalization or grouping, and this means that contact experiences supporting the conclusion, “She’s the one” lead conceptually and practically in the direction that is 180 degrees away from social stereotyping. This opportunity to define by negation can usefully be exploited. Application efforts can contrast generalized perceptions and consensus evaluations with those focused on uniquenesses.

Some contemporary social psychology research illustrates the value of this understanding and these practices. Eastwick and Hunt, for example, examined consensus vs. uniqueness in romantic evaluations and found that “participants’ romantic evaluations were more likely to be unique to a particular person rather than consensual” [26]. Anik and Hauser concluded similarly,

We find that partners who offer unique treatment are highly desired, and that people are willing to make significant sacrifices in partner attractiveness to receive unique treatment. This preference also impacts how people evaluate and interact with their romantic partners and how satisfied they feel with their relationships [27].

Everyday understanding of typical patterns of social engagement distinguishes between “playing the field” on the one hand and “mate dating” or “spouse searching” on the other. Only the second orientation focuses on identifying distinctions, special features, ways the prospective partner is different from others and is perceived to be singular, particular, distinct. This way of approaching one’s relational life is meant to lead the unattached person to the end goal of concluding that “He’s the one.” And as Crosby notes, it is the unique “center” of the person that is perceived in these moments “that above all engenders love for the person.” [19].

5.2 Co-constructing uniquenesses

When one acknowledges how critiques of the uni-directional and ethnocentric qualities of the traditional understanding of empathy have led to helpful revisions of that construct [8, 16] and also attends to empathy’s dependence on similarity, the need becomes apparent for a term that identifies what conversation partners are doing when they negotiate a quality of their relationship beyond mutual empathic understanding. In two articles and a short book, I have argued for the efficacy and usefulness of the practice I call co-constructing uniquenesses [15, 28, 29]. I mean this term to identify what is happening when both conversation partners are oriented toward understanding not just similarities but also differences between themselves and their partner, and when each conversation partner verbally and nonverbally offers to the other some context-specific features of their uniqueness while simultaneously inviting and attending to verbal and nonverbal expressions of relevant aspects of the other’s uniqueness.

The prefix, “co-” in this term signals that this process is accomplished by at least two people. The earlier explanation by Arundale [18] clarifies why this is important. The second element, “construction” indicates that this is a building process, not one of creating ex nihilo. Construction begins with the understandings and resources that conversation partners bring into their contact, including cultural context. This construction process generates a product that can be observed in interlocutors’ verbal/nonverbal talk. The term co- construction also signals that the effort operates within the ambit of social construction as it is articulated, for example, by Kenneth Gergen [30, 31] and John Shotter [32].

The third element names that which is constructed: two uniquenesses. The term uniquenesses is grammatically awkward because it pluralizes a word that is normally only used in its singular form, as in “Her experience is unique,” or “That system doesn’t permit individual uniqueness to emerge.” More importantly, this use of the term is also conceptually nontraditional, as is illustrated by the examples of uniquenesses that I provide later in this essay.

The traditional understanding is detailed and documented by neuroscientist David J. Linden in his recent Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality [33]. For Linden, uniqueness consists of such traits as height, speech accent, female sexual fluidity, sense of humor, chilly feet, and perfect pitch that combine to make each person an individual. The goal of his research is to identify the origins of these traits. His work decisively dissolves the simplistic “heredity or environment?” question by demonstrating that individual traits come about because of “the interacting forces of heredity, experience, plasticity, and development.”

Linden’s use of the term, “interacting” indicates that he might have adopted the “co-“ prefix in his account, and importantly, he didn’t. He understands experiences with others to be one of several “forces” that shape genetically determined features of each person into individual configurations. As I have noted, empathizing occurs between people, and my interest in uniqueness focuses there, too. I mean to highlight how the traditional impetus to look for commonalities is helpfully supplemented by an intentional effort to develop distinctive, situation-specific identities that facilitate fruitful conversations. These co-constructed uniquenesses can be understood to be the opposites of the socially stereotyped identities that ground many problematic conversations.

My account of uniquenesses also connects with social construction, because social construction scholars have called attention to the conceptual and especially the practical dangers of the ideology of individualism, the dangers of understanding humans as they are implicated by the Cartesian dictum, cogito, ergo sum. Gergen argues that “I think, therefore I am” should be replaced with “We communicate, therefore we are” (nos ergo communicamus sumus), because.

it is not the individual who pre-exists the relationship. .. but patterns of relationship and their embedded meanings that pre-exist the individual….My sense of understanding you is not thus my possession, but ours, and ours by virtue of the cultural processes in which we are embedded [31].

5.2.1 The power and the peril of the uniqueness construct

In many cultures, parents teach their children that, just as nobody has their DNA, retina image, voiceprint, or fingerprint, nobody has ever thought their thoughts, felt their feelings, dreamed their dreams. When one dies, a hole will be left in the world such that no subsequent human could possibly fill it. Culturally, this understanding of uniqueness is part of what ensures each human’s inherent value and worth. This is the basic view developed by Linden [33].

The primary weakness of this understanding of uniqueness is that, like the traditional understanding of empathy, it effaces humans’ social nature. Each person’s unique operating identity is co-constructed and situation specific. In a culture of one, there can be no individuals, because individuality requires comparison-in-context. If a police officer says, “Stop where you are!” and the person stops or runs, they become, alternatively, either a cooperating citizen or a suspect. Neither identity can coherently be self-administered out of context. A person’s identity in this situation is determined by how their actions compare with others that, in this case, the officer has experienced in similar contexts. In Gergen’s words, “the terms and forms by which we achieve understanding of the world and ourselves are social artifacts, products of historically and culturally situated interchanges among people.” [31] As a result, the hole that is left in the world when one dies is not like the hole a worm leaves in an apple or a mineshaft makes in a mountain. It is instead like an empty chair at a family’s Christmas, Kwanzaa, or Passover, a vacant space formerly filled by one’s yoga mat, or a missing voice at work.

6. The transformative potential of co-constructing uniquenesses

Close readings of actual conversations display how interlocutors engage in the process of co-constructing identities and how, in some conversations, they co-construct uniquenesses that power transformation. In Stewart [29] I identify how Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino co-constructed uniquenesses when they met face to face after DNA evidence and a confession proved that Jennifer was wrong when she identified Ronald as her rapist and condemned him to almost 11 years behind bars.

6.1 A story that displays co-constructing uniquenesses

The conversation recounted in chapter 31 of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a second example of this process [34]. This book rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and Oprah called it her most vital book club selection yet. The book vividly describes the infrastructure of Black/white racism in the US.

The conversation happened in the home Isabel and her husband purchased in a community that did not completely welcome them. Their neighbors were not unusual. Like many homeowners populating the mid-sized and large cities of the US—and most of them in the small cities and towns—these homeowners preferred to live around people who look like them.

Sixty years ago, if Isabel’s family wanted to live in this neighborhood, they might have had to challenge restrictive covenants in court, witness their neighbors’ white flight, or even struggle to go back to sleep after being jarred awake by noisy haters planting a flaming cross in their front yard.

But in 2016, the “Go back where you came from” messages were more subtle. Only one couple showed up to welcome them to the neighborhood, which highlighted the fact that the others did not. Sidewalk encounters produced few smiles or greetings, and dinner invitations came from old friends, not new ones.

The chilliness around their home was difficult enough to cope with while Isabel had her family’s support, but within a span of 18 months, she lost two of the most important people in her life, her husband and her mother. Both died unexpectedly. Sometimes, the double whammy of grief was almost unbearable. She especially missed her husband when she had to depend on hired contractors to fix things in the house, people who might resent her for living in this neighborhood and might or might not be inclined to help her or even to do their job.

So the partly flooded basement was more than just inconvenient. Water damage had already ruined some important papers and photos, and Isabel knew that the fix required skills she did not have. She called a plumber and knew she’d have to work with whomever showed up.

6.1.1 The heart is the last frontier

In Isabel’s words [33],

The man who came to the door smelled of beer and tobacco. He was wearing a cap like the men at the rallies who wanted to make America great again, the people who had prevailed in the election a month before. His belly extended over his belt buckle. The years had carved lines in his face, and stubble was poking through his chin and cheeks. He seemed not to have expected someone who looked like Isabel to answer.

He checked his clipboard to see if this was, in fact, the right house. Then, with an abrupt “Where’s the basement?” and a let us-get-this-over-with look on his face, he followed Isabel down the stairs. He stood there while she moved boxes to make space for him to better look for the leak. She began sweeping water toward the sump pump as he looked down at the wet floor.

Isabel told the plumber that she had been surprised to find three to four inches of water, partly because she hardly ever came down to the basement. “My husband was the one who came down here to check the filter on the furnace, check the fuse box, and patch things in his workshop. He died last year.”

The magnitude of that statement seemed not to register. The plumber just shrugged and said “Uh-huh.”

The plumber surveyed the boxes and stepped around a few of them, knocking a lampshade and wreath to the wet floor without stopping to pick them up. Isabel kept sweeping.

“How long’s it been since the water came?”

“Maybe since the rains last week. There’s a drain here somewhere. I wonder if it’s clogged.”

Isabel continued moving boxes and was feeling more alone with him just standing there. She lifted a heavy box, and he watched, made no gesture to help. He merely said, “You got that?”

“Maybe it’s the sump pump?” she asked. He went to look at it. “Nothing wrong with the sump pump,” he said dismissively.

She noticed packing popcorn floating in it. “Could that have kept the sump pump from working?”

“No,” he said, “but the sump pump needs cleaning out, though.”

He offered to write her an estimate for a new one, despite having just told her the old one was fine. Her frustration grew. She’d called him in to fix whatever was causing the water to build up, and so far, she was the only one sweeping water, moving boxes, searching for the drain. All he was doing was standing there watching her sweep (as women who look like her have been doing for centuries) and not fixing anything.

Since he wasn’t helping, she felt she had nothing to lose. She decided to throw a Hail Mary at his humanity.

“My mother just died last week,” she told him. “Is your mother still alive?”

He looked down at the wet floor. “No. .. no, she isn’t. She died in 1991. She was fifty-two years old.”

“That’s not old at all,” Isabel said.

“No, she wasn’t. My father’s still alive, he’s seventy-eight. He’s in a home south of here. My sister lives nearby to him.”

“You’re lucky to still have your father,” Isabel said.

“Well, he’s mean as they come.”

Isabel wondered to herself what his father might have exposed him to when it came to people who looked like her. But she kept it to the present.

“You miss them when they’re gone no matter what they were like,” she said.

“How about your mother?’ he wanted to know. “How old was she?”

“She was way older than yours, so I can’t complain about that. But she was sick a long time. And you never get over it.”

“I have an aunt in her eighties who still smokes and will ask you for a taste of beer,” he said and let slip a laugh. “She’s on my daddy’s side.”

Isabel smiled and tried to look at the positive. “So your father’s side is long-lived,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess they are.” His face brightened and he went over to the sump pump, bent down, and reached into it. A minute or two later, he stood up. “Okay, sump pump’s cleaned out.”

He turned to the area where the drain was likely to be. “It’s probably under the coffee table,” he said. “If you get one end, we can move it and see where it is.”

Together, they moved the table and, sure enough, there was the drain. “Drain’s not clogged, so that’s not the problem,” he said. “Lemme go get my flashlight out of the truck.”

Once back, he trained the flashlight along the floor, inspecting the perimeter of the basement, past the sink and the washer and dryer hemmed in with boxes, past the sawhorse, along the base of the furnace, every corner up and down. “I found it!” he said, jubilant.

Isabel ran over to him. “What was it?”

“It’s the water heater. Water heater’s gone bad.”

She stepped back in relief. “I knew it had to be more than the rain.”

“You’ll need a new water heater. This one’s gone.”

“My mother must have been talking to your mother,” Isabel said, “and telling her to get her boy to help her girl down here. ‘My daughter needs your son’s help.’”

The plumber smiled at the thought of that. He shut off the water to the heater, gave Isabel the estimate for the replacement heater, and charged her sixty-nine dollars for the visit, which she thought was fair. They wished each other a happy holiday, and he left.

Isabel’s phone rang. It happened to be an old friend and, while Isabel was telling her about the minor miracle she’d just experienced, the doorbell cut the call short. It was the plumber again.

He said he’d driven back to shut off the gas to the old heater so it would not be heating an empty tank. He knew his way around now, made his way to the basement, was lighthearted and chatty, momentarily family.

“This thing could have been much worse,” he said. “Water could have burst from the top, destroyed everything, and scalded you or anybody else who tried to fix it. I’ve seen way worse.”

As he headed back up the basement steps, he caught a glimpse of some old Polaroid photographs that Isabel had salvaged from the wet boxes she had pulled aside to air out.

He paused in the middle of the staircase. “Oh, you want those,” he said. “That’s memories right there.” Then he bounded out of house and into the light of the day.

6.1.2 Isabel and the plumber co-constructing uniquenesses

This true story’s main characters are familiar. Isabel is the long-suffering yet necessarily patient Black woman thrust into the role of sole homeowner by her husband’s death and forced to ask for help from a business in the mostly white community where she lives. The plumber is the iconic white, blue-collar worker who sees himself as superior to the Brown and Black people around him and who would prefer to interact with people who also call themselves white.

6.1.2.1 Evidence of caste

The first parts of the story show the validity of the thesis of Isabel’s book; namely, that there is in the US a four-hundred-year-old hierarchy as pervasive and inhumane as India’s caste system or the caste system that was enforced for twelve years in Nazi Germany, and this system still organizes everyday life in the US by reminding everybody who’s on top and who’s not.

At another point in this chapter, Wilkerson recounts how survey-takers and leafleteers in her neighborhood regularly ask her, when she answers her front door, whether “the lady of the house is at home.” Since she’s Black, they assume it must not be her. This has happened so often that she commonly replies, “No, she’s not here,” and to their question “Do you know when she’ll be back?” says, “No, no I don’t; Who shall I say is calling?” This dynamic accounted for the pause in the story while the plumber checked to make sure he had the right house before demanding, “Where’s the basement?”

The same racist power relationship explains why the plumber stood around while Isabel moved boxes to facilitate his inspection and while she fruitlessly tried to sweep water toward the sump pump. It also clarifies why, when Isabel disclosed that her husband was the one who regularly checked the furnace filter, monitored the circuit breaker box, and patched things until he had died only a few months ago, the plumber just shrugged and said, “Uh-huh.” In effect, the plumber was indicating, “As if I care.”

These needle pricks of subtle racism continued as the plumber tried to wrap things up quickly by noting about the perfectly functioning utility sink, “That’s where the water is coming in,” and curtly dismissing Isabel’s suggestion that there might be something wrong with the sump pump. He showed little respect for her ability to figure out what was wrong. She felt more alone as he watched her struggle to lift a heavy box with nothing more helpful than, “You got that?” As Isabel put it, “All he was doing was standing there watching me sweep (as women who look like me have done for centuries) and not fixing anything.”

A reflective student of U.S. culture—or a Black, Brown, or Indigenous Person of Color—would notice many more mundane markers of racist hierarchy in this story. Although she was the homeowner and probably earns more than the plumber, his first impression of her was apparently that she was The Help, and when it became clear that she was The Customer, he moved to complete his service call and get out of there. The story is filled with what some call microaggressions [35, 36].

6.1.2.2 Transformation

The tipping point of this race-freighted conversation happened when, as Isabel writes, “Something came over me, and I threw a Hail Mary at his humanity. ‘My mother just died last week.. .. Is your mother still alive?”

This utterance, this conversational move, this genuine question and the response changed everything. With it, Isabel put some of her humanity on the conversational table and invited the plumber to put some of his in the same place. Happily, he did. Both subsequently became unique to one another.

“No. .. no she isn’t,” the suddenly-more-engaged plumber replied. And then he disclosed, “She died in 1991. She was fifty-two years old.”

Nothing in the first part of their conversation predicted this response. The plumber’s dress, lack of eye contact, facial expression, impatient resentment, lassitude, even the smells that accompanied him suggested that he would remain at arm’s length, engaged with Isabel only enough to justify billing her for this house call. This likelihood played out over the first several minutes of their interaction. And then suddenly, abruptly, and yet authentically, in response to her disclosure and question, he became present to her. His gaze reflectively shifted to the floor, there was a pause, and then he responded to Isabel’s Yes/No question with not only a direct reply but also the date and his mother’s age at death. This elaboration indicates the plumber’s alignment with Isabel’s question, his encouragement of her drastic topic shift. In McGilchrist’s terms, his contribution to their conversation became much more characterized by stimulus discrimination [20].

As observers, we can see and hear this significant shift, and the fact that it was prompted by a disclosure and a single, five-word, question. We can speculate that the plumber had not had many conversations with people of color and had not experienced them—or any people, for that matter—expressing genuine interest in his life. He was probably a little surprised. And he also immediately recognized that this particular conversation partner had offered him a glimpse into who she was as a person and invited him to respond in kind. This is what Isabel meant by “his humanity” when she referred to what she did as throwing “a Hail Mary” there.

Isabel recognized the plumber’s alignment with her topic change and continued the conversational thread with “That’s not old at all.” When alignment happens more than once, it is often evidence of “affiliation,” [37] the act of bringing individuals into closeness or connection, and this quality was apparent as the plumber elaborated, “No, she wasn’t. My father’s still alive, he’s seventy-eight. He’s in a home south of here. My sister lives nearby to him.” What’s remarkable is that, in the time it takes to breathe twice, the plumber had invited Isabel to meet his immediate family. This is not a routine choice or an everyday action. You do not introduce your closest family members to just anyone.

Isabel and the plumber did not instantly become lifelong friends. That would obviously be unrealistic, and any close friendship talk would have sounded phony. But they did reverse the trajectory of their earlier interaction.

This reversal happened because Isabel’s question opened the door for them to co-construct uniquenesses, to craft together small pieces of what defined each of their identities in this situation. Both Isabel and the plumber had recently lost a parent, so despite their differences in gender and race, they were similar in this way. But their talk moved beyond this similarity as they shared a few snippets of their unique experience of this challenge that is common to almost all middle-aged people.

The plumber first noted, in effect, ‘Unlike you, I still have a father and he lives nearby.’ Following this personal thread, Isabel continued, “You’re lucky to still have your father,” and this comment about an important difference between them prompted the plumber to disclose a personal detail, possibly even a family secret of the kind you only tell a friend: “Well, he’s mean as they come.” This utterance put another significant difference on the table.

6.1.2.3 Mutually conditional interpretations

This part of their conversation illustrates how the two were building their talk together. Her statement, “You’re lucky to still have your father” was prompted by what he shared about his dad, and his next comment, “Well, he’s as mean as they come” was similarly shaped by what she said and how she said it. These are mutually conditional interpretations. Her contribution conditioned what he said next, and his next contribution functioned in the same way. The two were collaborating, especially on building the unique pictures of each that were emerging in their talk. She had initiated the topic shift to “shared humanity,” and he had accepted that topic and then added the ‘and we’re also different’ qualifier. This conversational move prompted her to respond, first by “contemplating the significance of” his rather intimate comment about his dad being mean and considering asking about his experience with “people who look like me” and then by wisely and humanely “keeping it to the present.” When she said, “You miss them when they’re gone no matter what they were like,” she was maintaining the distinction that he had identified while following the similarity thread of the ‘this is my family’ theme that the two of them were building together.

Encouraged by her gentle and respectful acceptance of his disclosure, the plumber reciprocated Isabel’s curiosity. “How about your mother? How old was she?” Isabel’s response acknowledged the differences that the plumber had identified—'Your parents are both gone; my dad’s still alive.’ And ‘Your mom was kind; my dad’s mean.’—and then offered another distinction followed by another assertion of similarity: “She was way older than yours, so I can’t complain about that. But she was sick a long time. And you never get over it.”

The plumber’s next conversational turn about his “aunt in her eighties” affirmed his willingness to stick with Isabel’s topic while also disclosing another snippet of his uniqueness. His comment might be paraphrased, ‘Yeah, but your family sounds pretty conventional while some members of my family are amusingly outrageous.’

At this point in the conversation, both Isabel and the plumber had acknowledged some similarities, shared some of their uniqueness in this situation, invited the other to do the same, and noticed how their conversation partner’s responses revealed some of what made each other unique. The plumber was uniquely present to Isabel as a son still acutely missing his mother even though she had died twenty-five years ago at age fifty-two, to whom he’d been closer than he was even now to his “mean” father, who was still alive and living nearby. Isabel was uniquely present to the plumber as a daughter coping with both her mom’s much more recent death and the loss of her husband whom she was especially missing now, when the basement was flooding. Although none of this information about uniquenesses was crucial to the professional, plumber-to-customer reason they were interacting, all of it helped overcome the toxic, racially charged contact that started when he arrived. Isabel’s courageous question and the plumber’s engaged response triggered empathic utterances that opened the door for them to walk through together, the door that led from the “racist stereotyping” space to the space in which they co-constructed uniquenesses.

The two of them progressed from adversaries to collaborators, from pains in each other’s necks to fellow humans coping in unique ways with both a wet basement and the deaths of close family. Subtle but important displays of this change emerged as the next contributions to their conversation came with smiles, small spices of laughter, and the plumber’s distinctive and fun memory of an elderly aunt.

Their collaboration continued as the plumber, without being asked, quickly cleaned out the sump pump, and together they lifted the coffee table covering the floor drain. He decided he needed his flashlight and hurried to his truck to retrieve it. Then, near the end of his careful inspection of the room’s perimeter, he did not just announce but “jubilantly exclaimed,” “I found it!” His expression of emotion and her noticing it display degrees of affect that tend to be present only when conversation partners are interacting personally. The leaking water heater was obviously the problem.

As they stepped back in mutual relief, Isabel offered a comment that would sound simplistic if taken out of the personal context they had co-constructed: “My mother must’ve been talking to your mother and telling her to get her boy to help her girl down there. ‘My daughter needs your son’s help.’” These words reflect an almost childlike picture of life after death that features winged loved ones perched on clouds looking down on their family members and collaborating with other angels to keep everyone safe. In this context, her comment displayed as much vulnerability as the plumber’s “He’s as mean as they come.” Both utterances display lack of pretense and personal details that help make the two uniquely present to one another.

The plumber’s response was ridicule-free and embodied appreciation and respect. Together, the two of them smiled at the thought. He gave her an estimate for a new water heater, charged her a fair price for the visit, wished her well, and left.

6.1.2.4 Relationship intimacy: “momentarily family”

Then, while Isabel was explaining the “minor miracle” she’d just experienced to a friend on the phone, the plumber came back. It had struck him that he had not turned off the gas to the hot water heater, and he wanted to be sure she was safe. It’s unlikely that the plumber who was met at the door by a Black woman, discounted her problem-solving abilities, and passively watched her sweep water would have been concerned enough about her safety to return to double check the gas valve. But after they’d become unique persons to each other, he did exactly that. “He knew his way around now, made his way to the basement, was lighthearted and chatty, momentarily family.”

The words in italics are Isabel’s, and they are remarkable. From “Let me get out of here as fast as I can” to “momentarily family.” From “Move your own crap out of the way” to “momentarily family.” From “You don’t have a clue about what’s wrong here” to “momentarily family.” His return and this comment display the power of co-constructing uniquenesses; they show what can happen when uniquenesses meet.

There is a clear before and after in this story. What they said and how they said it reveal the ground shifts that mark their conversation prior to her Hail Mary and after it—their mood, levels of engagement, presence to each other, degree of collaboration, reciprocal conditioning, facial expressions, body movement, tone of voice, level of intimacy. These changes display the power of the conversational move that Isabel made and the plumber reciprocated. Even in the face of the centuries old Black/white power relationships that mark US culture and that initially framed the interaction between the two of them, her question and his response were transformative. They moved together from struggling as stereotypical Black woman and white man to meeting as unique persons.

7. Through empathy to co-constructing uniquenesses

7.1 Three examples

As I have described, close reading of the story that makes up Chapter 31 of Caste reveals these two uniquenesses that were built by these conversation partners:

ISABEL IS UNIQUELY; A grieving child missing her recently deceased mother especially acutely because the flooded basement floor that brought the two of them together also intensified her current grief about her recently deceased husband, who would normally be able to fix the water problem.

THE PLUMBER IS UNIQUELY; A similarly grieving child also missing his deceased mother, who, unlike Isabel’s had died twenty-five years before, whose grief at her loss was exacerbated by the fact that his still living dad is “as mean as they come.”

At 6.0, I note that a second close reading of a transformative conversation appears in [29]. Jennifer Thompson-Cannino’s mistaken claim that Ronald Cotton had raped her condemned Ronald to over a decade in prison. Yet, after he was exonerated, their meeting in a Sunday School room of Ronald’s church triggered a transformation in who they were to each other from “violent Black rapist” and “lying white bitch” to social justice collaborators, co-authors, and friends. The analysis of this exchange displays the mutually conditional interpretations and three-utterance interaction sequences that these conversation partners employed to co-construct these two uniquenesses:

RONALD IS UNIQUELY; Curious about Jennifer’s state of mind and deeply grateful for her recognition that she hurt him profoundly. He is confidently certain that her apology is authentic, he empathizes with her pain, and he is strongly empowered by the way she now sees him as an individual.

JENNIFER IS UNIQUELY; Uncomfortable to be in close contact with the Black man she’s feared for so long, guilty, ashamed, and deeply embarrassed by her mistake, desperate for his forgiveness, and hopeful that their conversation might possibly be productive.

A shorter close reading in Chapter 8 of [15] examines a third conversation between White Fragility author Robin Diangelo and “Angela,” an African American professional whom Robin inadvertently treated in a racially inappropriate way. This exchange also ended well when Angela expressed her gratitude for Robin’s willingness to repair the relational damage she had done. This conversation co-constructed these uniquenesses:

ROBIN IS UNIQUELY; Highly motivated to repair her insensitive joke about Black hair, willing to subject herself to Angela’s evaluation multiple times, open to the unexpected criticism of her arrogance about the survey, and willing to commit to future public critique.

ANGELA IS UNIQUELY; Willing to meet, despite feeling offended, confident in asserting her competence, generous in her acceptance of Robin’s apologies, and willing to participate actively in repairing the relationship by treating Robin as a colleague.

In all three cases, evidence of co-constructing uniquenesses can be identified in the verbal/nonverbal talk. For example, Isabel and the plumber display mutually conditional interpretations in their collaboration over the “My daughter needs your son’s help” comment. Ronald’s empowerment is displayed in part by the lack of any pause between Jennifer’s request for forgiveness and Ronald’s explicit forgiving. Jennifer’s embarrassment is displayed in her utterance, “I don’t even know what to call you.” Robin’s willingness to subject herself to Angela’s evaluation multiple times is displayed by her asking “Is there anything else?” three times in their nine-turn conversation. Angela’s willingness to treat this white woman as a colleague is displayed in her final utterance, which expresses equal-power appreciation for Robin’s professionally thoughtful behavior.

7.2 Similarity and difference

Empathy was an important element in each of these conversations. The plumber’s aloofness was crumbled by Isabel’s “Hail Mary at his humanity” and he empathized with her present feelings of loss over her mother’s death. Both conversation partners felt similar feelings about their deceased mothers. In the second example, Ronald empathized with Jennifer’s embarrassment and shame and was dissuaded from treating her anything but gently. Angela also empathized with Robin’s discomfort and wanted to treat her with as much professional respect as Robin offered her. In each case, empathic perceptions of similarity facilitated the conversation partners’ connections with each other.

And the conversations display more than empathizing. The plumber identified one distinction when he noted that he was a son with a mean-as-they-come parent, not just deeply missed parents. Isabel highlighted an important difference between their two family’s acceptance of race conscious conversations when she decided “to keep it to the present.” The fact that their recognition and explicit acknowledgement of these differences enhances the depth or intimacy of their temporary relationship became evident in the plumber’s decision to return to Isabel’s home to turn off the gas and especially in Isabel’s metaphor, “momentarily family.”

Ronald and Jennifer’s conversation was similarly transformational, and in their case, the shift was long-lived. They met to talk about her mistake in 1997, published their coauthored book in 2009, and a decade later responded to questions for two hours at a “dismantling racism” program in my community. Together they succeeded in getting the North Carolina legislature to change the law governing compensation for wrongly convicted felons; their friendship is described in the final pages of their book, and some aspects of their relationship were on display during their onstage appearance. It was clear in that room, for example, that Ronald was considerably more reserved and Jennifer significantly more outgoing and assertive, and it was also apparent that both accepted the other’s differences. In response to my question, both affirmed that their identities changed in that consequential meeting and that their relationship twenty-two years later, at the time of their appearance, was deeply personal [38].

An initial, obvious difference between Robin and Angela is their views about the cultural significance of hair [39]. The importance of hair types, hair styles, and hair care were so much a part of Angela’s understanding of what it means to be Black that she noticed immediately how Robin’s joke about hair displayed her ignorance about this aspect of Black culture. The inappropriateness of Robin’s comment raised enough questions about Robin’s credibility that Angela mentioned her discomfort to one of Robin’s team members. Angela’s choice of confidant was significant. The fact that she spoke to one of Robin’s associates and not to a Black friend underscores the significance, to Angela, of the episode.

Robin empathized with Angela about the threshold point: Was the joke she made about Black hair racist enough to warrant repair? Robin and her advisor obviously believed it was—as Angela also believed. Angela also empathized with Robin when she noticed Robin’s effort to own her error, apologize, attempt to dismantle the racism and then acknowledge what she noticed. Angela “walked far enough in Robin’s moccasins” that she was willing at the end of their conversation to treat Robin as a fellow professional.

Again, however, their conversation was transformative mainly because of the ways it moved through empathizing to co-constructing uniquenesses. Angela’s description of how she experienced Robin’s attempted joke referred to two specific features of her relationship with Angela, its newness and the fact that it was a professional relationship, unlike the ones Angela had with the other persons in the room. Robin’s grasp of the depth of Angela’s resentment of Robin’s criticism of the survey—“My chest constricts as I immediately realize the impact of my glib dismissal of the survey”—illustrates what Robin knows by virtue of her work as a graduate professor. And perhaps most tellingly, Angela’s comment at the end of their conversation that, although similarly race-inappropriate events happened daily between Blacks and people who call themselves white, Robin’s willingness to repair what happened was at least unusual if not unique [40].

8. Conclusion: awaitedly idiosyncratic veers

Traditional conceptions of empathy efface vital features of the human events that make this construct consequential. When theorists and practitioners reformulate the construct as, for example, Hollan and Throop have done when they treat empathy as “a process that is temporally arrayed, intersubjectively constituted, and culturally patterned” [13], they respond helpfully to criticisms focused on relationality and ethnocentricity.

Now these reformulation efforts might usefully move toward acknowledging the presence and importance of co-constructing uniquenesses. Spouses, long term dating partners, and best friends are often chosen partly because they espouse political beliefs similar to one’s own, share similar socioeconomic expectations, have similar approaches to parenting, and enjoy similar leisure activities, music, and food. All such similarities facilitate mutual empathizing. And for these particular choices, uniquenesses are more important than similarities [26, 27]. “He’s easier to converse with than anyone I’ve ever dated.” “She’s got the exactly right balance of respect for traditional medicine and acceptance of holistic healing practices.” “I’ve never known anyone so intellectual and yet so practical. “They are more comfortable with their sexuality than any non-binary person I’ve ever known.”

As Brian Christian observes, what we want, chatting with old friends, is to have our traditional way of beginning—“Hi!” “Hi! How are you?” “Good, how are you?” “Good!”

give way pleasantly to the expectedly unexpected, awaitedly idiosyncratic veers; it’s what anyone wants from any conversation... a way to breeze past formalities and received gestures... and into the real thing [41].

Close reading of accounts of transformative conversations can identify these “awaitedly idiosyncratic veers,” that promote “the real thing,” when conversation partners co-construct situated uniquenesses in their verbal-nonverbal talk. Each time interlocutors collaborate on this project, their conversation can transform their relationship from one based on social stereotyping to its opposite.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to professors Valerie Manusov and Jody Koenig Kellas who encouraged development of this construct in its earliest stages. Professors Robert Arundale, Paul Falzer, and John Angus Campbell and Dr. Roger Shafer have provided helpful critiques.