"Objects Insignificant to Sight": Racial Violence and Empathy in Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black"

Abstract

"Objects Insignificant to Sight":Racial Violence and Empathy in Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black" John Lutz (bio) Way Down South in Dixie(Break the heart of me)Love is a naked shadowOn a gnarled and naked tree. Langston Hughes, "Song for a Dark Girl" Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist An effort to lay bare the root causes of the empathy deficiency that enables the brutal practice of lynching lies at the very center of William Faulkner's short masterpiece "Pantaloon in Black." First published in 1940 as a chapter in the novel Go Down, Moses, "Pantaloon in Black" confronts the underlying psychological and social forces that legitimize lynching by humanizing its central African American character, Rider. Recent discoveries in neuroscience and social psychology concerning empathy can provide a useful vantage point for understanding Faulkner's critique of racist violence in "Pantaloon in Black" and in Go Down, Moses more generally. The preponderance of evidence from these fields demonstrates that our emotional responses to the pain of others are hardwired into our brains and frequently felt with an involuntary immediacy over which we have little control. Feeling with others is a spontaneous, natural feature of our common humanity, a biological inheritance most likely developed as an adaptive trait in the process of human evolution. However, if our empathic responses to others are indeed a common biological inheritance, then how do we explain the apparent suspension of such responses in the inflicting of racist violence? In his research into empathic accuracy, William Ickes notes how negative frames of reference that "become inflexible, unyielding, and irreconcilable" [End Page 189] can create "an empathic stalemate or, even worse, the death of any mutual understanding" (Ickes 223). This discovery suggests that any internal obstacle to feeling with others might also inhibit our intellectual capacity to understand their lived experience or perspective. Ickes's research bears out the significant role that biases about designated out-groups play in our ability to make accurate inferences about what others think and feel. Citing similar research, Elizabeth A. Segal et al. have investigated how notions of otherness appear to be at the foundation of most barriers to empathy. If we consider a person fully human and on a footing of equality with ourselves, we can more readily consider his or her inner life and thoughts and successfully empathize. But "if we do not view them as fully human, the empathic process will likely be bypassed. Neurological data supports these points" (Segal et al. 89). Essentially, the more that a given set of ideological assumptions transforms others into inhuman objects, the less mirroring of the self and adopting the perspective of these others becomes likely or possible. This tendency of negative frames of reference to block empathy is particularly common in biased perceptions directed at entire groups. As Segal et al. note, "Framing entire groups as others to be feared is a step in the dehumanizing process and obstructs any possibility of empathic insight" (91). In addition, people tend to attribute more complex mental states to targets they like and ascribe complex emotions more readily to members of their in-group than an out-group (Echols and Correll 60).1 In an interesting study measuring emotional reactions to the pain of others, Avenanti et al. used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to determine whether racial membership or bias modulates the response to the pain of those in other racial groups. Their findings point to a lack of empathic brain response to outgroup members and provide support for the "notion that race-related prejudices can shape social categorization and lead to dehumanized perception of different others" (Avenanti et al. 1021). If racist ideas that dehumanize other individuals or groups block empathy and short-circuit even basic neurological mirroring responses, one would expect to see pronounced empathy deficits in instances of racially-motivated violence. The discoveries of neuroscience and social psychology concerning empathy illuminate and complement Faulkner's antiracist stance in "Pantaloon in Black" in two important respects. First, the existence of empathy as an inherited aspect of our common biological nature undercuts one of the central planks of racist...