Not My Story To Tell

I was on a run this week listening to the podcast Armchair Expert with guest Jamil Zaki. 

Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford, Director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, and author of The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. I was rounding mile three when I had to stop in my tracks to rewind. 

Zaki said:

Another tool in the empathy toolkit is storytelling. Whether it’s immersion in novels, or plays, acting is a really powerful sort of performance-enhancing drug for empathy it turns out. [...] You embody other lives, you enter other minds in various ways. So any engagement in a narrative art can be a really powerful road to empathy for ourselves and for others. And there’s these fascinating studies where [...] it’s like a clinical trial, except where instead of a drug you prescribe someone a novel or you prescribe them a film. It turns out there’s these little boosts in empathy especially when we engage with art whose protagonists are different from ourselves. So if a White-American reads a novel where a protagonist is Muslim-American, there Islamaphobia will decrease a little bit.  

This was fresh on my mind when we read the picture book Sulwe a few days later, written by Lupita Nyong'o and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. Sulwe is a beautiful young black girl, distressed about her dark skin. Her family has lighter shades of brown skin, but Sulwe’s is “the color of midnight.” After a loving, but ineffective, talk with her mother, Sulwe is visited in her dream by a star that tells her the story of two sisters, Day and Night, and their own revelations about the power of appreciating, loving and embracing the skin you’re in. 

I stewed over this incredible book for a while, trying to contrive some plight-of-the-redhead experience to share that relates to Sulwe’s story. 

But, I stopped, because Sulwe’s is not my story to tell. 

If I have learned nothing else from the past year, it’s that my job is to listen to and absorb the black experience I’m being told. And...to offer the same opportunity to my kids. 

They need to know sometimes the story isn’t ours. Sometimes, we just have to stop and listen.

#sulwe

#empathy

#jamilzaki