Third of a series on the elements and emotions involved with successful community-based innovation. While each blog stands alone, you’ll get the best understanding if you read them in order.
The community does not need your pity.
What is pity?
Most definitions offer a version of this: a desire for the relief of suffering
We often confuse pity with sympathy or even empathy but it’s different and often much more counterproductive. Pity is inherently condescending. It means that you are already looking down upon the people you say you want to help. It also may carry the assumption that you believe the obstacles before them are permanent.
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University School of Medicine defines pity:
“Pity is sorrowfully noting another persons suffering, but regarding them as outgroup, weak and/or inferior and hence underserving of any wish to alleviate or efforts toward alleviating suffering—has both automatic and deliberative influences.”
You may want their suffering to end but pity does not move you to do anything about it. I’ve caught all kinds of assumptions about poor people—that they are less intelligent, have less insight and are not active in working for change. Somehow undeserving of what you have. There have been several times, after I have orchestrated equitable conversations between working class and affluent people or between people of color and White people, when the affluent or race-privileged person has come up to me and said, “I did not know they were so brilliant.” It is also an underestimation of the historically based and systemic obstacles that hinder brilliant people.
It is worth interrogating your attitudes toward their suffering. Does it make you feel safer to not be in the same situation? Does it make you feel virtuous to feel anything at all for them?
Do you respect them? Admire them?
Do you assume that they do not observe your disrespect?
Pity is more about the pitier than the pitied. It signals a sense of superiority, of “at least I am not that.” But it may be hard to identify as such because doesn’t it make you a good person to feel anything for them? To notice their suffering and feel bad for them?
These feelings can easily co-exist with a genuine desire for the relief of their suffering. Humans are perfectly capable of carrying contradictory emotions.
Pity is not a call to action. It is the opposite. It can attempt to rob the “other” of their agency, creating a blindness to the knowledge they have of their own communities. I promise you that such attitudes will stifle your efforts, no matter how well-meaning.
