Without Empathy, We Don’t See People as People

I’ve been recently reading the book James by Percival Everett. It’s about the slave Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s gotten me thinking about empathy and the lack of it in humans. Empathy is not just a virtue–it’s the lens through which we recognize the humanity in others. Without it, people become objects, obstacles, or threats. History is soaked in the blood of empathy’s absence and the most chilling atrocities share a common root: the failure to see others as truly human.

The transatlantic slave trade didn’t just rely on violence; it depended on a systemic denial of empathy. Enslaved Africans were stripped of names, families, and identities. In the book I’m reading, Jim is just trying to get back to his family, but he is bought and sold by others in the book. Africans were branded, auctioned, and bred like livestock. This wasn’t ignorance, it was deliberate dehumanization. By turning people into property, slaveholders absolved themselves of guilt. Empathy would have made the cruelty unbearable. So it was repressed, silenced, replaced with pseudoscience and theology that justified oppression.

In Nazi Germany, Jews, Roma, disabled people, and others were targeted in a genocide that industrialized death. What made the Holocaust possible wasn’t just hatred–it was the meticulous suppression of empathy. People were reduced to numbers. Their names erased, their histories burned, their deaths cataloged in ledgers. The architecture of the Holocaust depended on millions participating–guards, secretaries, engineers–many of whom lived normal lives, compartmentalizing their complicity. Empathy had no place in the Final Solution.

But empathy’s absence isn’t just a relic of history. Under Trump’s administration, immigrants and asylum seekers are routinely described as “animals” or “vermin” or “invaders.” Children are separated from their parents and kept in cages, detained by ICE without due process, sometimes without adequate hygiene or comfort. The policy wasn’t a mistake; it was a strategy of deterrence through cruelty. To justify it, the administration relied on rhetoric that erased the humanity of migrants, calling them criminals, rapists, and threats to American “purity.” Empathy was a political liability, and it was treated as such.

Empathy is not weakness. It is an act of defiance in a world that profits from division and fear. To feel for another–to recognize a stranger’s suffering as real–is to refuse the machinery of dehumanization. When we listen, when we care, when we act in solidarity, we’re not just being kind. We’re fighting back against every system that says some lives matter less.

We don’t need more tolerance. We need more imagination: the kind that lets us picture ourselves in someone else’s place. Without empathy, history repeats itself. With it, maybe we can write a better one.