Why Is Empathy Important?
Racism Affecting Children’s Health
Racism plays a major role in child development. Seemingly having a huge impact on a child’s social and emotional development. This impact starts in infants; some say it starts in the womb. Even so, I have heard it said that racism is something that is a learned behavior. Not one person, at the beginning of their life, when they first come out of the womb, knows about color, gender, race, religion, or any difference that can separate people. All of these ideas or concepts separating humanity into subdivisions are learned from parents, society, friends, coworkers, social media, television, teachers, doctors, personal experiences, etc. Just like in the classroom the only way racism or empathy can become a part of a person’s personality or character is through repetition. For example, if a young boy is told repeatedly throughout his childhood that women are weak and inferior to men, it becomes a part of his paradigm, and how he views the world around him. The fact that this behavior is learned through repetition is what allows it to become such a strong belief. The way a civilized society tries to counteract the negative teachings of racism and degrading ideas about our differences is by trying to teach empathy with the same or more rigorous repetition.
In mathematics positive 1 plus negative 1 equals zero. A negative is canceled out by a positive. If we run this fact parallel to the concept of racism and empathy, then it stands to reason that the more we teach empathy and understanding the more we will counter the ideas and concepts of racism that are infiltrating our society as early as adolescents. It is easier to affect change in the developing mind of a child than it is to attempt to change negativity in the fully developed mind of an adult. Children are a pure and blank canvas when they are born, and it seems that they are ready to experience life. If we could look at our children and teach them empathy from the start by showing empathy in our actions with repetition and positivity, I think we would be able to change the role racism has played and is playing in society. This, undoubtedly, begins with us. It starts with us examining our own heart, mind, motives, intentions, ideas, and understandings. We are the example and what children are looking at. If all they see is a world being split into categories of value because of your skin color, then shame on us, because our world should be more than the color of your skin.
I was a kindergarten teacher, and the concept of colors is one of the first things that I taught my students about. While teaching colors, I taught one color a day and the students had the chance to interact with that color for the whole day. By the end of the unit my students would have had full experiences with each color, and they would have had the chance to create beautiful images by using all the colors. I wonder if we took that same approach with racism, and we taught our children about the beauty and the importance of every skin color, gender, race, and class, how much further we would be. If we showed them how to experience the best in relationships and to really get to know other ethnicities, if we took the time to show them the beauty of a person beyond their skin color, just how I taught the beauty and importance of each color in the rainbow, children would be able to have full experiences with other people regardless of their racial makeup.
When I taught colors to kindergarteners, I noticed when it was my students’ favorite color day. They really were engaged and so excited because I included their favorite color. I even created color raps for each color, and they all sang it and participated but they really loved the song that is about their favorite color. I loved seeing them smile, while watching their excitement rise about their favorite color. If we took that idea into society, consider how people would feel. They would feel so excited that everyone is embracing the color of their skin, and that people care about and show interest in it.
How would that make you feel, if someone was studying your culture and embracing it. It would make you feel so special, and it would make you feel that as a person you are important and that you matter to other people. Maybe it would even cause you to believe that people outside of your own culture also are important and matter. We have to have empathy and embrace everyone. We teach children that every color is important, which is a direct contrast because our actions through racism are showing them that certain colors are not important. It is showing them that white is better than black, yellow is better than orange, and purple is not as pretty as pink. It is so deep, how as adults, we are teaching our children to have this double standard. We tell them to look up at how beautiful the rainbow is and how the various colors and tints of colors are what make it look so beautiful, all while we lack to teach them how all the various tints of skin colors are beautiful and that if we each did our part it really could make the world a better place. Yet, children are growing up in fear, doubt, and hopelessness because the pretty painting they painted in kindergarten doesn’t match the reality of what is happening in our world today. We have to make changes because racism is really affecting our children’s health and social wellbeing and is affecting them in the classroom.
In this unit, I want to emphasize how empathy is important and how it is sorely needed in our society with our children’s lives at stake. We want strong healthy children, joyful children, and hopeful children. To get that we have to realize how much racism is killing our children from the inside out. The article, The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health” by Maria Trent, Danielle G. Dooley and Jacqueline Dougé, is dedicated to addressing these issues and how racism plays a key role in the development of children. Racism has a huge impact on children that receive, commit, and observe it. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) conducted a workshop in 2016, to develop a task force with the AAP to address racism and other forms of discrimination that impact the health status and outcome of minority health. In reading this we realize that racism impacts our children at very early ages and is one of the major driving forces of health inequities. Racism has been linked to birth disparities and mental health problems in children and adolescents.
We discover that children raised in African American, Hispanic, and American Indian populations continue to face higher risks of parental unemployment and to reside in families with significantly lower household net wealth relative to white children in the United States, creating barriers between them and equal opportunities and services that optimize health and vocational outcomes. (1) Many people focus on the social effects in society however; there are many mental health issues that also arises from the problem of racism. Mental health is something that we need to take seriously because we have children committing suicide, and walking in depression, anxiety, fear, and frustration.
Students of Color in School Systems
Another factor is how our jail cells are being built based on how third graders read, armed with the knowledge that minority groups struggle in academics compared to their white counterparts. We have more minority groups in the juvenile system than those of their white counterparts. In this article, we learn that the juvenile system is also detrimental to the social wellbeing of our children. (2) This is because racism is what is shaping our juvenile systems. Working in school systems, I have noticed that African American males are more likely to be in trouble, and to have harder consequences than just about anyone else. To fully examine this idea and concept it is important to look at where this idea has received its roots. In the very beginning when Indians and African Americans were introduced into American society, they were immediately dehumanized, and minimized to objects. In many cases they were bought, sold, or traded as cattle or land. The most interesting part of this is the cattle and land was viewed as more valuable than members of these civilizations.
Self-worth is the idea of how a person sees himself or herself. One can only imagine how being subjected to the process of being bought, sold, and traded as property, could affect what these human beings saw when they “looked in the mirror”. Proud heritages were lost to disrespect. Strong family traditions were trampled on like dirt under the feet of American society. As much as these proud civilizations tried to maintain their dignity, American society corroded away at the very roots. While the constructs of society and its treatment of different people have improved, the gap and destructive nature developed during some parts of history, unfortunately, remain.
If two runners run the same race at the same pace, but one runner starts ten minutes behind the other, the second runner will never catch up. Even though conditions are starting to change in the right direction, issues of lack of empathy still exist. If runner 1 cannot see the situation runner 2 is in and runner 2 cannot see the situation that runner 1 is in, how can either one feel empathy or try to understand what the other is going through. This is comparative to how minorities feel just trying to interact in this society. On the other hand, many in this society, while seeing the disparities and differences, lack the answers to bring about change. According to this article African American, Hispanic, and American Indian youth continue to be disproportionately represented. Incarcerated youth experience solitary confinement and abuse that has undermined socioemotional development and general developmental outcomes. (3)
Although institutions such as slavery were abolished more than a century ago, discriminatory policies, such as Jim Crow laws, were developed to legalize subjugation. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Alaskan native, Asian American, and Latino American populations have experienced oppression and similar exclusions from society. (4) Some racial and/or ethnic groups have received reparations and fared better than others over time, all the while, remnants of these policies remain in place today and continue to oppress the advancement of people from historically aggrieved groups. The landmark US Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education banned government sponsored segregation and laid a foundation for equal access to a quality public education. The US Department of Education continues to report institutional or structural inequality in educational access and outcomes. (5)
The disparity between the education system and children of color has been around since the beginning of the education system with children of color having always been at a disadvantage. Lack of access to quality education, lack of resources, lack of relevant subject matter and lack of materials continue to prove why minorities are still getting the shorthand of the stick when it comes to education. There are not many African American teachers in school systems. Student-teacher racial mismatch can impact academic performance, with studies showing that African American children are more likely to receive a worse assessment of their behavior when they have a non-Hispanic white teacher than when they have an African American teacher. (6) This finding may result from racial bias in teachers’ expectations of their students. The disproportionate number of Black students who have faced disciplinary exclusions from U.S. public schools has been documented as far back as the early 1970s. (7)
Research has shown that students of color, particularly Black students, continue to be suspended and expelled from K-12 schools at rates much higher than their proportion within the population and for the same, or similar, behaviors demonstrated by their white peers. (8) Similarly, data demonstrates that white and other non–African American teachers are more likely than African American teachers to predict that African American students would not finish high school. With data indicating that teachers may underestimate the ability of African American and Latino students, which can lead to lower grade point averages and fewer years of schooling. (9) African American students who have 1 African American teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college than their peers who do not have an African American teacher; the proposed mechanism for this improved long-term educational outcome is the exposure to a role model early in the educational experience. (10) We are finding that these same large disparities are also occurring for Hispanic/Latino and American Indiana students (Whitford & Levine-Donnerstein, 2014; Brown & DiTillio, 2013). This is critical when we view our school systems today and observe that there are not many African American teachers.
We need more minority teachers teaching for minority students to succeed. Children need to look for themselves in the curriculum and in the educational setting. Research has noted that educational achievement is an important predictor of long-term health and economic outcomes for children. Adults with a college degree live longer and have lower rates of chronic disease than those who did not graduate from college. (11) These findings indicate the importance of ensuring a diverse teacher workforce, particularly as the population of students in US schools continues to diversify. (12) Students who had a positive perception of school racial climates had higher academic achievement and fewer disciplinary issues. (13) It is paramount that we fix these things in order to really help change the trajectory of our children, molding them for a better America. It can teach them the importance of acknowledging that everyone is important, that we all matter and that we all can succeed. That realization can happen if we spread more empathy around. If we want to start changing, we have to embrace each other with empathy and start seeing each other and building each other up.
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