1.2 So, what is compassion?
The major difference between compassion and empathy is that empathy is about understanding the suffering of others, but it stops short of actually helping (Hougaard, 2020), whereas compassion is moving on and taking action to help alleviate someone’s suffering – more often than not by doing something practical.
In summary, sympathy means you understand what someone else is feeling through a lens of judgement. Empathy means that you are open to sharing what a person is feeling without judgement. Compassion is the willingness to relieve the suffering of another by action.
Activity 1
In this task, you’ll be asked to view media coverage depicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the treatment of Black and brown people trying to escape the fighting. If you are concerned this might adversely affect your mental health, you might like to skip this activity or engage with it only very lightly.
As you read this extract and watch the video below, you should reflect on how these made you feel. Below are some questions to consider as you read and watch the below resources:
- Did you feel sympathy or empathy or compassion, or not much at all?
- Did you know about the experiences of Black and brown people in Ukraine? If not – how do you feel now?
The article Why don’t we treat all refugees as though they were Ukrainian? offers some insight. For the purposes of this activity, you only need to read the selected text pulled from the opinion piece below.
Why don’t we treat all refugees as though they were Ukrainian?
But now is the time to clearly call out what human rights groups and independent journalists have for years been saying: That the U.S. and NATO-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere are racist, and that the callous dismissals of the resulting humanitarian catastrophes are equally barbaric.
There’s another reason why brown-skinned refugees are seen as undesirable. Welcoming those people fleeing wars that the West has fomented would be an admission of Western culpability. Not only do Ukrainian refugees offer palatable infusions of whiteness into European nations, but they also enable governments to express self-righteous outrage at Russia’s imperialist ambitions and violent militarism. If Ukrainian refugees are evidence of Russian brutality, then Afghan and Iraqi refugees are evidence of the same kind of brutality on the part of the U.S. and NATO.
Now watch some footage that was shared on social media.
See also …
Clips from TedEx Palo Alto - Okieriete Onaodowan: Okieriete Onaodowan (2017) in his TED talk ‘you have to walk a mile in my shoes but first you must take off your own’.
Gravitas: Western media’s racist reportage on Ukrainian refugees: Western journalists are being slammed for their racism while reporting on the refugee crisis in Ukraine.
Ukraine refugee crisis exposes racism and contradictions in the definition of human: Not only has the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought to light the awful tragedies that accompany armed conflict, but the subsequent refugee crisis has also uncovered deeply seated racism in the country.
Discrimination and racism as people flee Ukraine shared on social media: Video from The Guardian.
OpenLearn - Introducing Union Black
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.