Like many women of color and unlike Dr. Ford, she wasn't extended empathy or permitted any vulnerability.
I would say it is because we have both empathy and tribalism in our human nature--tribalism being the tendency to separate people into an in-group and an out-group, and extend empathy only to the in-group--but tribalism is no longer adaptive in a globalized world.
Research has shown that practicing mindfulness about your surroundings and the people around you makes you more likely to extend empathy towards them and to help when someone needs it.
Here he extends that empathy to the winos, the crackpots and the dispossessed, those ghosts who live to haunt the streets of a depressed city.
The book is also an extended argument with the philosopher Peter Singer, who bases his case for animal rights in part on the fact that some animals are more cognitively capable than the intellectually disabled people to whom we already extend our empathy.
If you are genuinely unable to apply your imagination and extend your empathy far enough – and you don't have to do it all at once; little by little will suffice, but you must get there – then you are a sociopath, and we should all be protected from your actions.
Extending your empathy beyond that requires effort.
l hope that gay people will never forget what it means to be the "other" -- black, poor -- and will extend their empathy to the struggles of those who still suffer from all kinds of injustice.
Booker's apparent empathy extends in many directions.
So he tries to do the same thing and his empathy extends beyond the highway.
