Recalling an appearance on a Sunday morning talk show where he was invited to discuss criminal-justice reform, Coates opens the book by affirming the chasm in lived experience between white and black Americans.

Writing midway through Obama’s second term, Coates offers a very different perspective on the potential for empathy to heal racial divisions. However, good policy had to be preceded by “a change in attitudes-a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts” consistent with overcoming, as a people, an “empathy deficit.” These “profound institutional barriers” needed to be torn down, Obama said. Speaking from what was once Martin Luther King’s pulpit, the candidate lamented America’s “inability to recognize ourselves in one another,” a condition that fuels destructive trends-failing inner city schools, racial bias in criminal-justice proceedings, the scourge of predatory lending-that disproportionately afflict minority communities. In an address at Ebenezer Baptist Church in January of 2008, Obama returned to a central theme of The Audacity of Hope, an “empathy deficit” that he believed was warping U.S.

Of course, a central claim of Obama’s original campaign for president was that politicians had proven themselves incapable of finding common ground, creating a legislative impasse in Washington that covered a whole host of issues, not the least of which those involving race. By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond “our limited vision.” We unburden ourselves of the trivial rigidities that divide us, allowing us to “find common ground” even in the face of our sharpest disagreements. In The Audacity of Hope, the book Obama wrote in 2006 to test enthusiasm for a possible White House run, he describes empathy as both the “heart of my moral code” and a “guidepost for my politics.” Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to “stand in somebody’s else’s shoes and see through their eyes,” Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. Obama is not an acknowledged interlocutor of Between the World and Me, but the book may be read as a skeptical reply to the putative power of empathy to transcend racial divisions-a leitmotif of Obama’s two books and a guiding conceit of his presidency.

在世界與我之間 by Ta-Nehisi Coates