Crossing The Color Line - Tate

This article proved to be very interesting to me for a few reasons. One is that I am from the South, and two that I get to see everyone's opinions from a Midwest (or mostly midwest) perspective in class about the issues from this article. From my upbringing I always noticed that the color line was rarely crossed or even touched. If it was, it was usually where a white woman would date or marry a black male, or vice versa, and when the color line was crossed, you could sense it was strongly frowned upon. I personally tried to ignore this and be open to all kinds of friendships. One of my good friends was an African American male, and he would sometimes share his opinions on the color line and give me and my other white friends a little, but still not much, insight to how the African American community feels about that issue. Like how in the essay it talks about how Dace says that a lot of black people avoid white friendships, my friend told me that he believed this was very true. He believes that most do not want to actually seek out a white friend, it just happens. People in the South are definitely, as Dace says, still scared of the color line. My friend said he respected me and some of our other good white friends and our little pack of friends so much because we never treated him any different just because he was black. Alot of how he described that relates to Dace talking about how she respected Bill because helped the black community and team and asked for no recognition or "That's great because you are white" praise from anyone. He was just casually being normal and treating them as people, not races of people. My friend frome home even said he feels we still hold back sometimes because he can tell we think some things might offend him. At times he will say "I don't care what yall say man, yall are my friends. Who cares!" It was shocking sometimes growing up with him in our close knit group of friends. The part of empathy in this essay is very intriguing and thought provoking for me. Obviously the fact is that no one can "truly" know exactly how another feels at any given moment or about a certain issue. The essay talks about how one must not only try to know what another person is feeling, but should learn to "share" those emotions as well to be truly be empathetic. Another side to that mentioned was that you must always keep the "as if" aspect in your mind when trying to empathize with another. One line from the essay says, "...noting that although it is impossible to put oneself in another's place, it is possible to 'behave as if one understands the world as others do' '' From my experiences growing up in the south, I believe African Americans do not want white people to do so, because they say there is no way we could understand what they feel and why. I have heard that numerous times from black people growing up through the years at home. So while empathy is said to play a strong role in this essay to help cross the color line, I believe there are still some issues that might come up in doing so. 1. Lustig and Koester say "although it is impossible to put oneself in another's place, it its possible to 'behave as if one understands the world as others do' ". In doing so, could that make empathy a dangerous thing to use in trying to cross the color line in some way? 2. Can empathy ever "really" serve its purpose and accomplish the goal of undestanding what others actually feel, or is it a hopeful myth?