Empathy Interrogating Multiculturalism Gaze

Megan Boler discusses how a student, or one can produce empathy while reading, in “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism's Gaze.” Boler believes that the Aristotelian way of producing empathy while reading only produces passive empathy. When passive empathy reading occurs it does not guarantee social change within the reader. It is basically a waste of time trying to identify with the text because there is no action to social justice.
Boler argues that social imagination is important because it “allows the reader the possibility of identifying with the ‘other’ and thereby developing modes of moral understanding thought to build democracy” (154-5). For example, when one tries to take in information, we usually don’t show any emotion or feeling toward it; social imagination on the other hand allows readers to develop emotions on the information that is being processed. When reading a piece of literature, one cannot feel empathy Boler claims. The text alone can not create one to challenge one’s own view on the world, although education can help challenge your ways of thinking about the causes of injustice. “Passive empathy is not a sufficient educational
Meaning they are only showing partial identification, but when having empathy requires full identification. This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. Sympathy “commonly refers to a sense of concern based not on identical experiences but experiences sufficiently similar to evoke” the same feeling (157). Empathy, on the other hand, is experience when one has actually experienced the same feeling or suffering. Readers that read with passive empathy, have trouble “putting oneself in the other person’s shoes” (158). This is what causes the reader to not directly relate to the other. I makes the other seem less important compared to the