Toward a 'Global Empathetic Agenda' - A Spotlight on Dr. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas

My weekly Purposeful Empathy newsletter is dedicated to amplifying the voices of people from around the globe who believe the world needs more empathy - and are doing something about it. This month, I’m highlighting three leaders in the empathy movement whose work profoundly inspires me.

Dr. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas believes there’s an urgent need for global empathy. She makes this claim not only as an empathy scholar, but also thanks to lived experiences.

In the preface of her book, Empathy in the Global World, she describes an incident that happened in Bernice, Louisiana when she was a little girl:?

As my father and I walked down the narrow main street near a drugstore - with a soda fountain - that served ice cream, I asked my father whether we could go inside for an ice cream cone. As I write these lines, it is still difficult for me to do so without tears welling up in my eyes. I watched the face of my dejected father as he uttered words that wounded my gustatory expectations and placed social consciousness on a shelf where I could reach it.” “We cannot go into that store for ice cream,” said my father, “because…”

A half century later, Carolyn concludes: “The challenge of empathy is the great challenge of our time.”?That is why, as a distinguished Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, she advocates passionately for “empathetic literacy.” To her this means honing skills that allow citizens to manage intercultural encounters with competency and care.

Skills she teaches in her classroom.

In a conversation on my podcast, she also described the importance of recognizing cognitive diversity. To her, everybody has a right to speak their mind, providing they do so in a congenial manner. If done with care and respect, differing perspectives - and even heated debates - can lead to mutual understanding.

Even better, she argues that empathy contributes to our public good and human flourishing.

Carolyn’s book ends with an epilogue: “For empathy to become realized in more exquisite ways, we must not only know about the awful conditions of others, acknowledge that there is suffering in the world…but we must do something marvelous about it.”

Her invitation to us is to take ‘exquisite’ and ‘marvelous’ empathic action. How lovely is that!?

Want to learn more about transformative power of empathy? Order my debut book, Purposeful Empathy: Tapping Our Hidden Superpower for Personal, Organizational, and Social Change.

Watch my Purposeful Empathy interview with Carolyn Calloway-Thomas on YouTube here or listen to it as a podcast on your favourite platform (Spotify or Apple Podcasts).