<p>Welcome back! I’m so stoked you’re here and hope that the last two reflection guides have supported you in thinking deeper about hope. Today, let’s add to that and chat about the trap of empathy and how we can instead, turn our hope in to witness.</p><p>Sometimes the gap between hope and hopelessness, mourning and solidarity, grieving and collective liberation…it just seems too big.</p><p>Sometimes we respond this vastness by numbing the pain, to turn away, to tell ourselves we can’t witness these atrocities and still be okay in our world, in our lives, in our relationships.</p><p>But we are supposed to be in pain. We are not supposed to feel nothing in the face of violence. We are not supposed to cling on to quote unquote normal as if we have not been transformed by what we have witnessed. We are not supposed to go on unwounded and unfazed in our daily lives as if genocides are not happening around us, as if they were not happening in our names.</p><p>Our discomfort is not a sacrifice, it is an ode to our ethics. Our ethics are not a sacrifice, because our hope and our dreaming can only exist through the roots of our ethics. There’s nothing to hope for if there’s nothing we’re willing to fight for. There’s no solidarity, if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed in witnessing the violence against another. There’s no dreaming if we don’t let ourselves see how the world needs to be changed.</p><p>And sometimes, on our way to hope, solidarity, and collective liberation, we fall into the trap of empathy and this new word I learned from diasporic Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza, solipsism - that we can only see the world through our experience of it, that our experience of must be the most centered experience.</p><p>I’m going to read an except from Sarah’s writing called The Work of the Witness which I will link in the email accompanying this audio so that we can fill this with more context: (remember to head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> if you’re not already on the list for the email!).</p><p>Okay here we go:</p><p><p><strong>AS LONG AS PALESTINIANS ARE ALIVE</strong> to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has [observed], empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, <a target="_blank" href="https://poets.org/poem/dear-aleph">put</a> more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”</p><p>Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.</p><p>Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.</p><p>Or, much better expressed in the words of my cousin, the pharmacist, (Translated) <em>I continue to insist, we have not gotten used to bombing and we are afraid of everything happening to us. We have not gotten used to the sight of suffering. No, it always breaks our hearts. We have not gotten used to the massacres perpetrated by the occupation. No. For every martyr, there was a life.</em></p></p><p>Empathy, especially the empathy taught to us through the colonial imagination of psychotherapy, is not solidarity. </p><p>As Robin D.G. Kelley notes and as paraphrased by Travis Heath, empathy is seeing someone that you can see within yourself, whereas solidarity is seeing someone you can’t see in yourself.</p><p>Solidarity requires a witnessing, and witnessing requires a wound. So don’t turn away.</p><p>And if we were to build upon that and consider Tema Okun’s work on white supremacy, we can see that white supremacy tries to convince us we have a right to comfort and then that right to comfort tries to convince us that we must do everything to be okay, to be quote unquote happy, including turning off our compassion, turning off our ethics, turning off the discomfort that would move us into resistance because it might quote unquote hurt us too much.</p><p>But turning away rather than turning in doesn’t actually do us any favors. Staying ignorant when we already know something atrocious is happening doesn’t save us from living in a devastating world.</p><p>Not to mention, we are not entitled to being okay and safe and comfortable when atrocities are happening, in our names, for us to stay so. Compassion isn’t enough for us to rest into our self-image of what it means it live our ethics. Compassion is a wild card. It can lead you to the state of discomfort that moves you into action, aka. solidarity. or it can lead you deeper into complicity in the name of self-protection. So what does it mean for us, if our response to witnessing violence is that it hurts us too much for us to be continually exposed to its reality?</p><p>And what does it mean for us, if our support is predicated only on consuming the broadcasting of violence?</p><p>Quoting again from Sarah Aziza in the Work of the Witness: </p><p>“Ultimately, I posted the photo of my father, his face redacted. Not an appeal to, but an interrogation of, would-be witnesses; an attempt to turn the gaze back onto the spectator. What does it feel like to encounter even this small disruption in access to us? If it triggers surprise or frustration, what does that say of the viewer’s expectation, their intent? Is compassion for this boy conditioned on the legibility of his face? Sometimes, it is an act of power to withhold, to refuse to show. “They can’t see us,” I have often said, speaking of the masters of the West. What I mean is, “if they could see us, the current world order would collapse.”</p><p>Mia Mingus talks about a similar concept from a Disability Justice lens, which is the idea of forced intimacy. Forced Intimacy is the idea that disabled folx have to show all their cards in order to get the smallest ounce of access, of dignity. I think about how this relates to our solidarity with Palestinian, Sudanese, and Congolese resistance. How can we hold each other accountable to doing ethics, to work towards a free Palestine, a free Sudan, a free Congo, without needing Palestinians, Sudanese and Congolese folx having to continually coax us and remind us of our ethics, at great risk to themselves?</p><p>What are we willing to leave on the table, to hold our share of accountability in this moment?</p><p>What entitlements do we need to redefine so that our hope and our dreaming can root itself in this wound?</p><p>I want to be safe but not if it comes at the safety of other people. I will not play hot potato with violence.</p><p>Collective liberation is being able to root yourself in this fight to examine your complicities so you can continue to stay implicated.</p><p>It requires you to feel; it is exhausting, it is excruciating, and it is healing and connecting and liberatory.</p><p>So back to you, is there solidarity accompanying your gut-wrenching compassion? What’s your compassion leading you to?</p><p>In what ways do you allow your heart to break and soul to wound as we fight for collective liberation?</p><p>In what ways can you foster your hope and dreaming through your wound of witnessing?</p><p>I’ll leave you with a poem-ish? That pieced itself together in my mind as I was processing and writing this:</p><p><p>What a privilege it is to be fragile. What an ode to my humanity that this hurts me. May this wound lead to witness, may this mourning lead to active resistance, and may resistance turn hope into dreaming and liberation into reality.</p></p><p>This audio series is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at <a target="_blank" href="mailto:hello@reflectingonjustice.com">hello@reflectingonjustice.com</a>; let’s co-create our resistances together.</p><p>In each audio we’ll be referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already, so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get on the list.</p><p>Our next audio in the series is all about joy as a liberatory practice, and the importance of collective hope in our work.</p><p>If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler from Hong Kong occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.</p><p>And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to reflecting on justice at <a href="https://reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe</a>
![<description><p>Welcome back! I’m so stoked you’re here and hope that the last two reflection guides have supported you in thinking deeper about hope. Today, let’s add to that and chat about the trap of empathy and how we can instead, turn our hope in to witness.</p><p>Sometimes the gap between hope and hopelessness, mourning and solidarity, grieving and collective liberation…it just seems too big.</p><p>Sometimes we respond this vastness by numbing the pain, to turn away, to tell ourselves we can’t witness these atrocities and still be okay in our world, in our lives, in our relationships.</p><p>But we are supposed to be in pain. We are not supposed to feel nothing in the face of violence. We are not supposed to cling on to quote unquote normal as if we have not been transformed by what we have witnessed. We are not supposed to go on unwounded and unfazed in our daily lives as if genocides are not happening around us, as if they were not happening in our names.</p><p>Our discomfort is not a sacrifice, it is an ode to our ethics. Our ethics are not a sacrifice, because our hope and our dreaming can only exist through the roots of our ethics. There’s nothing to hope for if there’s nothing we’re willing to fight for. There’s no solidarity, if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed in witnessing the violence against another. There’s no dreaming if we don’t let ourselves see how the world needs to be changed.</p><p>And sometimes, on our way to hope, solidarity, and collective liberation, we fall into the trap of empathy and this new word I learned from diasporic Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza, solipsism - that we can only see the world through our experience of it, that our experience of must be the most centered experience.</p><p>I’m going to read an except from Sarah’s writing called The Work of the Witness which I will link in the email accompanying this audio so that we can fill this with more context: (remember to head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> if you’re not already on the list for the email!).</p><p>Okay here we go:</p><p><p><strong>AS LONG AS PALESTINIANS ARE ALIVE</strong> to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has [observed], empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, <a target="_blank" href="https://poets.org/poem/dear-aleph">put</a> more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”</p><p>Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.</p><p>Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.</p><p>Or, much better expressed in the words of my cousin, the pharmacist, (Translated) <em>I continue to insist, we have not gotten used to bombing and we are afraid of everything happening to us. We have not gotten used to the sight of suffering. No, it always breaks our hearts. We have not gotten used to the massacres perpetrated by the occupation. No. For every martyr, there was a life.</em></p></p><p>Empathy, especially the empathy taught to us through the colonial imagination of psychotherapy, is not solidarity. </p><p>As Robin D.G. Kelley notes and as paraphrased by Travis Heath, empathy is seeing someone that you can see within yourself, whereas solidarity is seeing someone you can’t see in yourself.</p><p>Solidarity requires a witnessing, and witnessing requires a wound. So don’t turn away.</p><p>And if we were to build upon that and consider Tema Okun’s work on white supremacy, we can see that white supremacy tries to convince us we have a right to comfort and then that right to comfort tries to convince us that we must do everything to be okay, to be quote unquote happy, including turning off our compassion, turning off our ethics, turning off the discomfort that would move us into resistance because it might quote unquote hurt us too much.</p><p>But turning away rather than turning in doesn’t actually do us any favors. Staying ignorant when we already know something atrocious is happening doesn’t save us from living in a devastating world.</p><p>Not to mention, we are not entitled to being okay and safe and comfortable when atrocities are happening, in our names, for us to stay so. Compassion isn’t enough for us to rest into our self-image of what it means it live our ethics. Compassion is a wild card. It can lead you to the state of discomfort that moves you into action, aka. solidarity. or it can lead you deeper into complicity in the name of self-protection. So what does it mean for us, if our response to witnessing violence is that it hurts us too much for us to be continually exposed to its reality?</p><p>And what does it mean for us, if our support is predicated only on consuming the broadcasting of violence?</p><p>Quoting again from Sarah Aziza in the Work of the Witness: </p><p>“Ultimately, I posted the photo of my father, his face redacted. Not an appeal to, but an interrogation of, would-be witnesses; an attempt to turn the gaze back onto the spectator. What does it feel like to encounter even this small disruption in access to us? If it triggers surprise or frustration, what does that say of the viewer’s expectation, their intent? Is compassion for this boy conditioned on the legibility of his face? Sometimes, it is an act of power to withhold, to refuse to show. “They can’t see us,” I have often said, speaking of the masters of the West. What I mean is, “if they could see us, the current world order would collapse.”</p><p>Mia Mingus talks about a similar concept from a Disability Justice lens, which is the idea of forced intimacy. Forced Intimacy is the idea that disabled folx have to show all their cards in order to get the smallest ounce of access, of dignity. I think about how this relates to our solidarity with Palestinian, Sudanese, and Congolese resistance. How can we hold each other accountable to doing ethics, to work towards a free Palestine, a free Sudan, a free Congo, without needing Palestinians, Sudanese and Congolese folx having to continually coax us and remind us of our ethics, at great risk to themselves?</p><p>What are we willing to leave on the table, to hold our share of accountability in this moment?</p><p>What entitlements do we need to redefine so that our hope and our dreaming can root itself in this wound?</p><p>I want to be safe but not if it comes at the safety of other people. I will not play hot potato with violence.</p><p>Collective liberation is being able to root yourself in this fight to examine your complicities so you can continue to stay implicated.</p><p>It requires you to feel; it is exhausting, it is excruciating, and it is healing and connecting and liberatory.</p><p>So back to you, is there solidarity accompanying your gut-wrenching compassion? What’s your compassion leading you to?</p><p>In what ways do you allow your heart to break and soul to wound as we fight for collective liberation?</p><p>In what ways can you foster your hope and dreaming through your wound of witnessing?</p><p>I’ll leave you with a poem-ish? That pieced itself together in my mind as I was processing and writing this:</p><p><p>What a privilege it is to be fragile. What an ode to my humanity that this hurts me. May this wound lead to witness, may this mourning lead to active resistance, and may resistance turn hope into dreaming and liberation into reality.</p></p><p>This audio series is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at <a target="_blank" href="mailto:hello@reflectingonjustice.com">hello@reflectingonjustice.com</a>; let’s co-create our resistances together.</p><p>In each audio we’ll be referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already, so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get on the list.</p><p>Our next audio in the series is all about joy as a liberatory practice, and the importance of collective hope in our work.</p><p>If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler from Hong Kong occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.</p><p>And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to reflecting on justice at <a href="https://reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe</a></description>](https://us-central1-podcastguru-217d6.cloudfunctions.net/gcf_get_image?image_url=https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts112/v4/94/ad/ac/94adac98-3608-8e63-11ea-a6f62c826553/mza_9650449513858701990.jpg/600x600bb.jpg&width=300&height=300&api_key=xqFmUFX5BHLBTA)
