FridayFiction - Empathy Engine

I am collaborating with The Butterfly Effect on an experiment we call "#FridayFiction".  We post something once a fortnight... and this is my latest:

The Empathy Lab explains that “empathy is a core life skill and a revolutionary force for social change as we put it into action”.  The Lab promotes the use of literature to foster empathy in young people.  They quote the multi-award-winning author Neil Gaiman:

'In reading, you get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals'

Each year, the Empathy Lab promotes an 'Empathy Day' (this year it’s 9 June) and produces a list of ‘Read for Empathy’ books aimed at teachers for use in schools.

But it is not just children whose empathetic capacities can be enhanced through stories – it applies to the rest of us, too.

And in these troubled times, is it not more important than ever that we try to understand what the lives of others might be like?  Rather than read a research paper, or a technical report or a policy briefing, perhaps it might be better to read a novel.

Not just any novel, mind.  Too often, when we do read fiction, we stick to material containing characters that we think are “like us”; and that may serve merely to reinforce our existing prejudices and assumptions.

I recently read the Booker-prize winning The Sellout by Paul Beatty.  The protagonist is a black man living in Los Angeles who grows artisanal marijuana and water melons and who (deep breath) keeps a slave named Hominy and tries to reintroduce segregation.  The book is uncomfortable, funny, at times painful and frequently breath-taking.

I don’t want to suggest that I now “know” what it’s like to be a black man living in South Central LA – I cannot possibly know that – but, after reading the book, I felt a great deal more conscious of the privileges of being a prosperous white man living in a safe European city; and a great deal more alert to the fact that so many others do not share my privileges.

I hope it has had an effect on my day-to-day work, how I go about my everyday life.  I could have read a dozen sociological tracts, but none, I believe, would have done the work of the ‘empathy engine’ written by Beatty.