Part 2: Promoting awareness without lived experience? 2 more steps leaders can take
Written by Jon Jon moore
Last week, we started by exploring lived experience as a kind of expertise, but not analysis. (If you missed it, you can read it here!) This week, we’re diving into two more steps you can take while sharing about lived experiences you don’t have as a leader or communicator.
2. Feelings vs. understanding: bad and good empathy
What I call bad empathy is any effort to project the feelings produced from someone’s lived experiences onto someone who doesn’t have those experiences. And unfortunately, it’s been popular for a long time!
The American minister and abolitionist John Rankin was famous for writing against slavery in a most peculiar way — by imagining himself as an enslaved person, and dramatizing the brutality that he (read: slaves) faced. While abhorrent, you can imagine his justification — to build empathy in Whites who were not even sympathetic to the experiences of slaves.
Rankin’s method didn’t provide an opportunity for the experiences of slaves to speak for themselves — he covered up failures instead of exposing them.
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This is why communicating to produce understanding in people who don’t have the lived experiences you’re sharing about is always the way to go.
For example: If you’ve never stood outside in sub-zero temperatures waiting for a local bus that never arrives, you will never feel that particular, frigid frustration of public high school students in Detroit. But, you might be able to understand how many of us felt — anxious, cold, disappointed, and you may also understand that the failures that led to this point are unacceptable.
In fact, that understanding might produce new feelings — of anger or care — and these might lead your audiences to take action, and be a part of the solution!
Next steps: Take stock of the feelings experienced in, and connected to, your work, and identify how the systems at play have helped produce them. When you start writing, begin by clearly explaining the problem you're working to solve to help audiences understand what's going on and why it's important. Then, share your proposed solution — and trust that your audience can invest in your vision for the future!
3. Locating yourself — and your audiences
My first communications job was for a death penalty think tank. Often, I wanted to communicate the injustice and suffering we see on death row by highlighting just how different this world was from the world of my audience, 99 percent of whom were not imprisoned.
But the truth is, without the people who support the death penalty serving on juries and continuing to support its legality, it wouldn’t exist. Most of us know someone who supports the death penalty. In this way, the world of my audience and the world I was trying to make real for them were one and the same — even if it was harder for me, and for my audiences, to accept.
It’s important to acknowledge that all of us play a role in the systems we’re fighting against — even if we can’t see it at first.
Next steps: Help your audiences understand their role in the work you do — and what steps they can take to make a difference. For example, if your audience isn’t experiencing housing or food insecurity, can you help them identify ways they can leverage their resources to provide for those who are? Likewise, if apathy is an obstacle to gaining ground on policy changes or expanding your volunteer roster, be honest about that — and invite your audiences to identify and work against indifference as it comes up in their own lives.
When we’re honest about the experiences that we share with our audiences, and how these differ from — and may inform — the lived experiences of others, we uplift the issues at hand and empower our audiences to be a part of the change we want to see.
