As communication professionals, we keep our ears to the ground to forecast the key communications themes moving within our ecosystems. Recently, there has been a lot of talk of emotions. A sampling of headlines proves the point, with many referencing anger, worry, fear, turmoil as well as some cautious hope. These are not surprising themes given the magnitude of changes impacting every sector of US society and many others around the globe. But not all these connections to emotions are showing up in ways that immediately make sense.
You may have heard that some public figures are claiming that empathy is being weaponized in American society today. What does this bewildering assertion mean? It may be easy to dismiss statements of this kind as attempting to provoke or incense. But, it is important to look closely at what is being said in this case. These claims imply that those in our society who are concerned about inequality and inequity are too concerned about the good of “others” and that this harms “their people.” In this worldview, empathy can actually be corrosive to society at large.
This can only be understood from a mindset that carves up who belongs in “our” society—a mindset based on scarcity and othering. Understanding or experiencing the feelings of another person who is being harmed or systematically disadvantaged is understood as dangerous, if there is a foundational belief that resources are finite and “our” existence is threatened by people so different from “us” that they cannot be understood as equally human and therefore deserving of the same things “we” hold dear. However, in the social sector, we have in the last few years been grappling with just how damaging that mindset is in itself. It is at the heart of racism and colonial extraction, and the challenging internal reflections that have occurred in many nonprofit, foundation and social change spaces.
Over the last twenty-plus years working toward social change, The Wakeman Agency has seen how empathy is an extremely important element of communication for the future of our communities and society at large. It plays an important role in shifting public perceptions among formerly unaligned audience members on key issues linked to inequity. For example:
- The narrative change advanced by the language used to speak about abortion has shifted to messaging that centered on women’s health and reproductive rights. The new narratives moved away from a flashpoint vocabulary and introduced into public debate a set of terms that highlighted the shared values that elicited empathy among audiences—the desire to promote health for women and greater rights for women overall.
- The race-class narrative research shows the power of using language that increases audiences’ sense of who belongs to “us”—who should be welcomed into a shared space—and directly recognizes the harms inherent in exclusionary rhetoric, such as racial scapegoating that pits “others” against “our communities.”
We also know that there can be dangerous ways of using empathy that are sometimes employed in the social sector. Usually with the intention of raising funds for worthy causes:
- This is most prominent when nonprofit communications lean heavily on victimization narratives, and those that work to evoke pity from donors of all kinds.
- Another similar form of this is in lionizing donors, or focusing attention on the accomplishments of organizations in ways that make them the central actors at the expense of the real experiences of people living through injustice.
As we’ve written before, not only are these communications tactics based on the possibility of short-term gains and unlikely to produce long-term buy-in from new audiences, they also use communications as a means that is misaligned with the intended objectives at the heart of the social change sector.
So, what does this look like for your communications today? Now more than ever, social change communications should be grounded in the practice of Narrative Justice. This means in all your communications efforts should work to use your stories, language choices and visual communications to:
- Center accurate accounts of lived experiences in ways that recognize the dignity of those who are the focus of your communications.
- Amplify the voices of those impacted by structural and historic dynamics incongruous with their aspirations for a better future.
Careful use of empathy in your messaging is essential. We urge you to not back away from the value of this key insight as you formulate communications strategies in this climate of high emotion. If you are unsure how to shift your communications for the current context, or would like to learn more about what communications guidance can do for your organization, reach out to The Wakeman Agency to schedule a private conversation.