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I attended Christy Vines’s public lecture “Faith, Race, and Politics: Can Empathy Help Bridge Our Divides in Our Polarized World?”September 28th. Regularly, this would not be an event I would attend, merely for the fact that I find it difficult to follow long spoken lectures, especially without taking notes. However, she introduced her talk with a unique “experiment,” where she asked the audience to imagine that we were professional photographers, hired for the task of capturing a picture of the last tree on earth. She painted a vivid picture as she asked us to close our eyes, describing in detail how large and beautiful the tree may be. Not until later, though, did Vines reveal that she intentionally omitted key details such as the location of the sun and the perspective from which we were taking our photograph. Vines did ask some of the audience members to explain their visualisations, which aided in driving her point home. One individual from the crowd detailed how his mental picture was from the perspective of lying on the roots, while capturing the branches in the air, and another person explained how they backed far away, in order to capture the entire tree. 

After listening to wildly different scenes from the audience and letting the idea steep, Vines then explained how our conceptions of an ideal picture were all inherently different, but all of them would fulfill the requirements of her assignment. The goal of this was to portray our unique lived experiences and backgrounds as influences on our “ideal” images, which could be generalised to other ideal concepts, such as ideal workplaces and communities. She explained how being empathetic in understanding other backgrounds would allow us to form vital connections that would help collaboration in increasingly polarised environments. Empathy, for vines, is the ability to understand and sympathise with diverse lived experiences and allow us to connect to and how they may influence an individual’s perspective. Although Vines believes that we live in incredibly divisive times, yet we must actively work towards at least understanding the perspectives of others. She also claims that empathy will allow us as people to connect and cooperate more effectively and subvert the limitations of dehumanisation and biases. This is the first step in a quest for a more equitable local and global society, and allows us to act in pursuit of helping and furthering ethical community building. 

Vines successfully conveyed her point. The opening exercise provided the perfect segue into her main argument. Speaking about empathy is difficult in it being an abstract concept, however Vines was able to create a scenario that the entire audience could relate to. Her message of empathy, as more than tolerance seamlessly developed from that point, as we were all able to relate to the idea and open to receiving it. 

I found her rhetoric and message compelling and her delivery effective. This lecture connected to the “mind” unit of the Humanities course.  Empathy would allow humans to understand the thinking processes of both nonhuman animals and artificial intelligences in a way that concerns the moral and ethical conflicts regarding personhood. The willingness to understand what is culturally alien to oneself has an analogue in understanding what may be alien to one’s species. Perhaps, if we can connect more closely with other humans, by considering more empathetically how they may think, we will in turn be able to understand artificial intelligences better, in spite of how different it may be from our thought. To connect more closely with other humans on an empathetic level would also lead to a more epxansive understanding of other consciousnesses and our own communities.

In the past three weeks we have engaged with various sources—music, literature, academic writing, a play, and an interview. Often those genres have overlapped in productive ways. What are some of the genre cross-pollinations that you’ve noticed in this unit’s material? Is there a function to multimodal forms of critique? What do you think that function may be?

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Within the three-week Spirit unit, engagement with various source genres has resulted in significant overlaps between varied mediums. When examining the sources, being an interview, literature, a play, and music, one may observe several overlaps and overarching concepts. The imbrications between Blood at the Roots, The Souls of Black Folk, “The Threshing Floor,” spirituals, and the interview expose an underlying scaffolding that productively contributes to the meaning of the whole. In this way, it appears to an observer that the sum is greater than the parts. 

This scaffolding is closely connected to the kaleidoscope metaphor employed by Dr. Webb in his production of Blood at the Roots, which reveals an example of commonalities between different mediums. Within this play, the characters display nuanced identities using the play as a mode of delivery. Several monologues exemplified these nuances by placing them in the centre of the light and stage, while the characters spoke about the self, who was only then revealed to the audience and themselves. This concept of an exterior and interior self was coined “double consciousness” by W. E. B. Du Bois, but just under one hundred years prior to the events upon which the play was based on. Du Bois claimed that the Black individual experienced a sundered consciousness, separated by a veil. This veil acted as a filter through which society saw the Black person differently through, while also serving to reveal this alternate self to the Black person. Thus, the self is fragmented into the true self and the self as perceived by society. 

This double consciousness is explored by James Baldwin in his “The Threshing Floor”. This chapter, using the technique of free indirect discourse, reveals that John experiences a complex journey that may not be understood by those who only see him from the outside. Baldwin leans into the local aspect of this hallucinative experience in order to then separate John from reality, describing how he viewed even his physical surroundings with an altered lens, or veil. James Baldwin wrote Go Tell it on the Mountain in 1953, which forms an almost perfect midpoint on the interval from The Souls of Black Folk and Blood at the Root. 

Regardless of the shared principle, in this case double consciousness, this reveals the scaffolding that contributes to the sum in being greater than the parts. This is intrinsically related to continuity and humanity as a temporal construct, as Du Bois’s academic writings created a vector that is clearly followed through from before his time, to the time of James Baldwin and Dominique Morisseau, the playwright behind Blood at the Roots. All three of these artists communicated a similar principle using techniques exclusive to their art and unique experiences. This, in itself, is the scaffolding that adds value to evaluating the sum of the parts. This connective tissue is a ubiquitous concept that follows a vector or streak through time from the past to the present into the future, that may be understood in multiple disciplines. Taken into a macro level, the overlaps observed in cultural artefacts such as these reveal common themes etched in humanity over time.