When Empathy is Not Enough

There are moments I return to—not just for how hard they were, but for what they revealed. For what I can no longer unsee:

• A mother in New York City, looking to a child welfare worker who held her child’s future—and finding only distance.

• A brother in South Sudan, wailing next to his dying sibling as the world stayed impossibly still.

• A family in a refugee camp in northern Pakistan, bodies held tense, waiting for recognition that never arrived.

In moments like these, we reach for empathy—hoping it will hold, hoping it will heal. And sometimes, it does. But more often, it is breath without bone—tender, yes, but unwilling to carry the weight that justice demands.

When empathy is asked to do the work of justice, politics, or systems, it falters. It centers the feeler, not the one in need. It demands performance. It mistakes feeling for action.

Let me be clear: empathy matters. It illuminates pain. It draws us close. In therapeutic and relational spaces, it helps mend what’s been frayed—through steady, attuned presence.

But when empathy becomes the lens through which systems are built, we risk centering feeling over function—resonance over responsibility.

Aruna D’Souza exposes a hard truth: the drive to know the other—whether a person, a culture, or a pain—is rarely innocent and almost never free of hierarchy. It often unfolds within relationships shaped by power, where knowledge is extracted, not offered; where consent becomes performance, and understanding becomes appropriation.

In intimate spaces—caregiving, family, friendship, therapy—empathy builds bridges. It softens, it holds, it stays. But in the wider arenas—where laws are shaped, budgets drawn, power enacted—empathy is not enough. We need more than recognition. We need healing. Shared power. Enduring structures that do not sway with sentiment.

Without them, lives are reduced to objects. Suffering becomes conditional. And dignity frays—tethered to the passing glance of those who get to look away.

I’ve spent over 25 years in spaces like these—where the words of care are spoken, but the weight of power remains unmoved. Across child welfare systems, humanitarian contexts, and mental health landscapes, I’ve witnessed empathy reach its limit—the place where it can no longer carry what needs to be held.

What if care should not depend on recognition? What if justice cannot wait for emotional alignment?

Hannah Arendt, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, warned: “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” That line has never left me. Humanity didn’t save them. Recognition didn’t save them. Stripped of rights and belonging, they were left exposed—and expendable.

Arendt’s warning still stands.

Because when action depends on recognition—and recognition depends on empathy—the ground beneath us remains unstable.

I have seen the danger of rooting justice in feeling.

From conflict zones to child welfare systems, I’ve witnessed humanity made conditional—not only by race, class, or citizenship, but by whether someone can tell the right story to the right person at the right time.

Even when recognition breaks through, it rarely holds. As Isabella Hammad writes, “individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like… Look away.” Recognition flares. Power redirects the light. And those most in need are left back in the shadows.

And when we look away, I’ve seen what follows. The child whose pain wasn’t “severe” enough. The asylum seeker whose story didn’t fit the “script.” The mother whose grief was misread as “noncompliance.”

In these moments, empathy becomes both currency and cage. It cannot hold what must be held.

People don’t need to be explained. They need to be believed. Resourced. Supported. Given room to decide, to resist, to become.

I’ve worked in systems that weren’t built to share power—only to manage vulnerability, contain risk, and preserve order. When empathy enters these spaces, it often becomes a soft mask for control. It soothes, but it doesn’t shift the terms.

And those doing the direct work—caseworkers, social workers, youth advocates, public defenders, counselors, nurses—are often expected to hold it all together with nothing but grit and heart. They aren’t the ones writing the policies or crafting the talking points. They’re the ones showing up every day, absorbing pain that isn’t theirs, carrying its weight in their bodies, trying to make something human in systems that often aren’t. As it turns out, they’re less Superman and more Sisyphus—pushing uphill against burnout, bureaucracy, low pay, and the quiet toll of being asked to do the impossible without enough support. What they deserve isn’t just praise. It’s support, partnership, and the infrastructure to keep going.

If systems can’t carry what’s needed, we must ask: who ends up carrying it?

I’ve seen children removed from their homes in the name of safety, when safety could have been built with support. I’ve seen institutions celebrate “community participation” while centralizing every decision. I’ve sat in rooms where community voices were honored on paper—then ignored in practice.

What’s missing in these moments isn’t feeling. It’s material possibility. Not abstract hope, but concrete power—the chance to shape one’s own conditions, not just survive them.

Empathy might open a door. But what happens next demands something stronger: care—not as emotion, but as structure. Commitment—not to feelings, but to staying. Shared labor—not only for those who resonate, but for those long denied a voice.

What if the task isn’t just to feel with, but to build with?

This is the shift I believe in: from feeling to building. From recognition to shared power. From being moved to moving differently in the world.

When understanding fails, transformation lives in the structures we build to hold one another.

Solidarity is not born of recognition. It is born of staying. Of working. Of refusing to vanish when the feeling fades.

We need architectures of care that do not collapse when feeling does. We need practices that can weather the absence of resonance.

What would justice look like if it didn’t require the performance of pain? What could we build if we stopped waiting to be moved? What might become possible if we stopped asking for recognition—and started acting from responsibility?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re blueprints.

As Ruha Benjamin reminds us, our imaginations are powerful—and ready to be reclaimed from supremacy, scarcity, and fragmentation. To build something else, we can begin with structure rooted in care, not just sentiment. With accountability shaped by commitment, not just intention. With presence that endures—not just reaction that fades.

Empathy cannot carry this weight.

But we can. And we already are.

Every act of staying. Every refusal to turn away. Every structure we build to hold one another- this is what endures.

Note on Influences

This piece is braided with the thinking of many writers, organizers, and scholars whose work continues to open pathways for me.

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism shaped my early understanding of how precarious human dignity becomes when rights are severed from structures and tethered instead to recognition. Her warning—that “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human”—has remained an anchor across my years in systems that too often confuse acknowledgment with care.

Aruna D’Souza’s Imperfect Solidarities sharpened my understanding of empathy’s limits—how it recenters the ego of the feeler and demands performance from the marginalized. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s call for the right to opacity, D’Souza exposes how the drive to “know” the other—whether a person, a culture, or a pain—is rarely innocent. It often reflects dominance more than care, extracting understanding without real consent. Her work pushed me to see how even empathy, when untethered from obligation, can replicate the very power imbalances it hopes to heal.

Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself reminded me that we are never fully transparent—even to ourselves—and demanding total clarity does violence to the very complexity that makes us human. For Butler, responsibility lives between opaque selves: we stay in relation not because we fully understand, but because we choose to remain accountable anyway. This is not just personal—it’s political. An ethic that honors opacity challenges systems that make legibility the price of care.

Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger sharpened my awareness of how moments of recognition, even when they break through, are often quickly neutralized by political and institutional forces invested in maintaining distance and denial.

Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance gave voice to a refusal I had long felt but struggled to name: the refusal to equate worth with exhaustion, and urgency with care. Her writing on rest as a portal to liberation reshaped how I think about labor, presence, and refusal.

Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto reignited in me the urgent, political work of collective dreaming. She reminds us that our imaginations, too, have been colonized—and that building something different requires not only critique, but new structures animated by different values.

Finally, thinkers and practitioners like Mia Mingus, Dean Spade, and Mariame Kaba—through their writing on transformative justice, mutual aid, and community accountability—have modeled what it means to build enduring architectures of care outside the machinery of punishment and extraction.

This text is planted in the soil they prepared. And like everything I write, it also carries the presence of the children, youth, families, and communities with whom I’ve had the privilege of walking the path—those who have taught me, again and again, that feeling is not enough. What endures is woven through action. It rises, step by step, in what is shared.