Author: Jim

NYTimes: Can the ‘Instigator-in-Chief’ Win on ‘Law and Order’?

Can the ‘Instigator-in-Chief’ Win on ‘Law and Order’? nyti.ms/32azU4E

Opinion

Can the ‘Instigator-in-Chief’ Win on ‘Law and Order’?

Extracting political power from racism and fear is a Trump specialty. Will it work one last time?

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

President Trump in Kenosha, Wis., last week. He described the unrest in American cities that has grown out of protests against police brutality as “domestic terror.”
Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

On Feb. 20, Time magazine asked Henry Louis Gates Jr, the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard, about America’s “missed opportunities for racial equality.”

Gates replied:

One of the most dramatic shifts to the structure of the African-American community has been the doubling of the Black middle class and the quadrupling of the Black upper middle class since 1970.

Gates was drawing attention to the fact that from 1995 to 2017, the number of Black Americans with advanced degrees — Masters, Ph.D., M.D. or J.D. — tripled, going from 677,000 to 2.1 million. Over the same period, the percentage of Black adults with college degrees more than doubled, from 11 to 24 percent.

William Julius Wilson, a University Professor at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” made a related observation in 2017:

One of the most significant changes in recent decades is the remarkable gain in income among more affluent blacks. When we adjust for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of Black Americans earning at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more almost quadrupled to 13 percent (in contrast white Americans saw a less striking increase, from 11 to 26 percent).

These gains have not been restricted to affluent Black Americans.

Since 1966, two years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the percentage of African-Americans with incomes below the poverty line has been halved, from more than 40 percent to 20.8 percent in 2018.

Decades of defamatory rhetoric from Donald Trump — as both citizen and president — notwithstanding, Black America is doing vastly better than it was before the advent of the civil rights movement.

In “50 years after the Kerner Commission,” a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report, Janelle Jones, John Schmitt and Valerie Wilson found that “African Americans today are much better educated than they were in 1968” and that this development “has been accompanied by significant absolute improvements in wages, incomes, wealth, and health.”

Take wages. “The inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the typical Black worker rose 30.5 percent between 1968 and 2016, or about 0.6 percent per year,” they write, three times the rate of the “slower real wage growth (about 0.2 percent per year) for the typical white worker.”

In a separate 2018 Institute for Family Studies report, “Black men making it in America,” Brad Wilcox, Ronald B. Mincy and Wendy Wang write:

More than one in two Black men (57 percent) have made it into the middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38 percent in 1960, according to a new analysis of census data. And the share of Black men who are poor has fallen from 41 percent in 1960 to 18 percent in 2016. So, a substantial share of Black men in America are realizing the American dream — at least financially — and a clear majority are not poor.

The three authors elaborated in a commentary published by CNN:

Despite a portrait of race relations that often highlights the negative, especially regarding Black men, the truth is that most Black men will not be incarcerated, are not unemployed and are not poor.

At the same time, there is a note of pessimism among those who study neighborhood and school segregation — and the logic of this pessimism, in turn, is crucial to understanding Trump’s strategy in the closing months of the 2020 campaign.

For nearly 40 years, Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has studied racial housing patterns. Looking over his research and the work of others has led him to tackle the subject of racial and ethnic bias as it looks from the vantage point of 2020. He wrote me in an email:

Most white Americans simply cannot imagine there are Black or Hispanic neighborhoods with low crime, with high quality schools, with rising housing values, and that look well-kept. Despite the fact that there actually are such integrated neighborhoods that I have lived in myself, any mention of a high percentage Black or Hispanic (usually 30 percent or more) overwhelms their senses and emotions and signals ‘AVOID!’ no matter what else they are told about the neighborhood.

It is just this bias that Trump is determined to exacerbate — to inflame — in his sustained attack on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Trump claims that Democratic efforts to increase affordable housing in the nation’s suburbs under the aegis of the 1968 Fair Housing Act “will destroy your neighborhood and your American dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”

Trump has repeatedly pressed this theme, as well as the related theme of what he calls “open borders.” At a July 15 briefing, Trump warned that “the left-wing group of people that are running our cities are not doing the job that they’re supposed to be doing.”

This alleged failure, Trump continued, prompted his administration to conduct an “all-out campaign to destroy MS-13, a vile and evil gang of people” to counter the “radical left-wing politicians who have fought to open borders and welfare for illegal aliens.”

Four days later, Trump tweeted:

The Radical Left Democrats, who totally control Biden, will destroy our Country as we know it. Unimaginably bad things would happen to America. Look at Portland, where the pols are just fine with 50 days of anarchy. We sent in help. Look at New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. NO!

Trump’s political specialty is provoking and exacerbating subliminal or latent anxiety — and this probing is especially disruptive in the context of racial tensions that have surfaced in the aftermath of recent police killings of unarmed Black men.

Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton, has dedicated much of his work to understanding the prejudices Trump is trying to tap into. In an essay, “Still the Linchpin: Segregation and Stratification in the USA” he published in January, Massey wrote that:

In the minds of some whites, the mere presence of blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions actually are. Although whites say they would welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice they avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few blacks and confine their search to overwhelmingly white residential areas exhibiting white percentages well above those they offer in describing their ‘ideal’ neighborhood to survey researchers.

Robert Sampson, a professor of social science at Harvard, emailed me his views on the barriers facing those who work toward greater neighborhood diversity — barriers Trump seeks to raise and multiply:

Our research has shown that perceptions of disorder in a community are highly influenced by the racial composition of that community even after accounting for the characteristics of the individual, crime rates, poverty and observed levels of disorder.

Minority communities, Sampson argues, when compared to white communities with similar levels of school quality, crime and other measures “were rated much higher in multiple aspects of social and physical disorder, and interestingly, this pattern held for both blacks and whites.”

In light of these often unacknowledged attitudes, the question becomes: Can Trump eke out an Election Day victory by focusing attention and capitalizing politically on the looting and fire-setting associated with some of the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the police killing of Floyd and other African-Americans?

Emerson, the sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is deeply worried about bigotry, writing in an email:

The protests — when they turn violent as shown on many newscasts — are reinforcing white negative stereotypes about African-Americans (even though often it seems white folks are involved in the violence), preserving the wedge between groups, and because they signify losing the moral high ground, are severely curtailing what momentum there was.

Emerson asks whether “more whites will vote for Trump because of these violent aspects of the protests. The protests are giving whites, in a sense, ‘permission’ to do so.”

The depth of Emerson’s pessimism is reflected in his 2011 paper, “Who We’ll Live With: Racial Composition Preferences of Whites, Blacks and Latinos,” co-authored with Valerie Lewis and Stephen L. Klineberg, of the University of North Carolina and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

“It may be,” they write, “that whites simply will not or cannot separate race from the proxies associated with it, even if told otherwise.” That is, the three authors continue, “the categories ‘Black’ and ‘Hispanic’ may simply mean for whites higher crime rates, declining property values and poor quality schools.”

Massey shares Emerson’s concern over possible repercussions from the televised disorder and violence at some Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“Unfortunately, the stereotype of Blacks as lawless and violent persists in U.S. culture and permeates American social cognition, both explicitly and implicitly,” Massey wrote in an email. “So yes, to the extent that media reports (and especially images) link Black protesters to street violence, it reinforces negative stereotypes and creates animus against the Black Lives Matter movement and those who support it.”

This is especially true “with the Republican base,” Massey continued; whether “it will turn white suburbanites against the Democrats is a possibility, but not a given.” That will be determined by

the degree to which voters see Trump as being the instigator-in-chief and responsible for inciting the violence, or instead blame the B.L.M. demonstrators themselves.

In fact, many voters do perceive Trump as the “instigator-in-chief.”

For that reason, Robert Sampson was more cautious in his estimate of the potential for Trump to make political gains by focusing on the violence and destruction associated with some of the protests:

The lesson from prior research is that racial context often frames how we define and interpret the meaning of disorder and acts of violence or destruction. The active stoking of racial tensions by Trump exploits this social process, but whether it will yield a political benefit for him is unclear.

An alternative scenario, Sampson wrote, is that

increasing revulsion at vigilantism and public violence occurring under this administration’s watch may spur a multiracial backlash that offsets or overturns the standard script.

Christian Davenport, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and the author of “Media Bias, Perspective and State Repression: The Black Panther Party,” does not believe there will be much movement either to the left or the right among racially conservative whites. In an email, he argued that

The truth of the matter is that there is probably very little that could take place during the protests that would shift the opinion of some whites. Their positions are fixed already and they would likely only see the negative manifestations which you could almost always find during extended campaigns.

For these voters, Davenport continued, “the idea of African-Americans in a group might be enough of an offense.”

Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out in an email that the fear of a surge of conservative reaction to the protests is based on the assumption that events today fit the model of “1988, and Trump is the equivalent of George Bush trotting out Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis.”

Spence contends that reporters and columnists should

write about 2020 as if it were 2020. Not as if it were 1990. Write as if Trump is NOT George Bush, but something altogether unique. Write as if we are in a moment in which the entire world protested George Floyd’s death, not just Black and brown people in Los Angeles after Rodney King.

Spence is referring, of course, to the 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush, who capitalized on Willie Horton ads to win the presidency, just as Richard M. Nixon relied on a law-and-order/silent majority theme designed to convert George Wallace voters into reliable Republicans.

The May 25 killing of George Floyd — captured on video — prompted a surge of support for Black Lives Matter.

Polling conducted by Civiqs shows that more whites opposed Black Lives Matter than supported the organization from April 2017 to the start of May 2020. But by early June, a week after the Floyd killing, white opinion shifted strongly, to 44 percent approval of the movement and 34 percent disapproval.

In the weeks since then, as the media and the Trump campaign have focused on the violent conflict in Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle and, more recently, Kenosha, Wis., white attitudes toward Black Lives Matter have returned to pre-Floyd levels, according to the Civiqs data, 46 percent opposed, 40 percent in support.

From that perspective, the trends would appear to be moving in a direction favorable to Trump. But Trump continues to trail Biden in head-to-head surveys. Unlike Nixon or Bush, Trump’s appeals to law and order have not yet paid off in the polls.

Why not?

I think my colleague Ron Brownstein may have pinpointed the reason Trump has had trouble capitalizing on the violence in a Sept. 3 Atlantic article, “The Huge Snag in Trump’s Re-election Pitch”:

The biggest problem with Trump running on restoring order is that his performance in office has caused many voters to view him as the candidate of disorder.

Traditionally, voters have favored the Republican Party over the Democratic Party on the panoply of issues related to violence and the use of government force to restore order, whether it’s crime, terrorism or national defense.

An August 27-28 Yahoo/YouGov survey asked registered voters “which comes closest to your view, ‘Trump will protect us from the chaos’ or ‘Trump is the source of the chaos’?” 30 percent chose protect and 50 percent said Trump was the source of chaos.

A second set of Yahoo/YouGov questions asked whether the country would become more or less safe under Biden or Trump. By a slim margin (42-39), registered voters said that the country would become safer under Biden. If Trump gets re-elected, voters said the country would become less safe, 44-36.

Along similar lines, an Aug. 29-Sept. 1 Fox News survey of Wisconsin voters asked “who do you trust to do a better job on policing and criminal justice — Joe Biden or Donald Trump?”

Voters in that key state (where Kenosha is located) preferred Biden over Trump by 47-42.

A more recent September 2-4 CBS News survey asked whether Biden and Trump are “trying to calm the situation down” or “trying to encourage fighting.” By 49-30, voters said Biden was trying to calm the situation while, in the case of Trump, voters said he was trying to encourage fighting by 47-39.

Perhaps the most revealing question in demonstrating Trump’s liability in running as a law-and-order candidate asked whether Trump or Biden had “the right temperament” to be president.

By 59-42, voters said Biden had the right temperament; by 63-37 they said Trump did not.

These numbers clearly pose a threat to a candidate claiming that he will restore order in the nation’s “Democrat-run cities,” as Trump likes to say.

Mark Penn, director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, told The Hill that the most recent survey shows rising concern over disorder in the nation’s cities: “The civil unrest has become a significant issue in the country,” Penn said. “Nine in 10 expect it to be an issue and support for the police has been rising to nearly 7 in 10 support, while favorability of Black Lives Matter is just about half” of what it had been three and a half months ago.

Penn’s comments should be music to Trump’s ears, but the same poll found that in these circumstances, voters see Biden as better equipped to handle the issues that Trump has been laying claim to.

The Hill put it this way:

The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll finds that 58 percent of voters say Biden would do a better job of curbing violence in cities and 57 percent say he’d do better addressing civil unrest. Fifty-nine percent say Biden is better equipped to solve the nation’s issues on race and policing. By a margin of 54-46, Biden leads Trump on establishing law and order. Biden is viewed as the candidate best equipped to bring the country together by a 61-39 margin.

There are still 55 days to go before Election Day, a lifetime in politics. Imponderables abound: turnout, lying to pollsters, accusations of voter fraud and double voting, active voter suppression, the fate of absentee ballots, the political and logistical status of the United States Postal Service, and that’s before we even get to the three presidential debates.

The biggest imponderable of all is whether Trump will attempt to subvert the election directly, whether he will accept results he does not like, what unfathomable lengths he might go to — and whether the Republican Party, the Senate and the Supreme Court will stand firm in support of democracy or abet Trump in his reach for unconstrained power.

NYTimes: The Inanity of Zoom School Suspensions

The Inanity of Zoom School Suspensions nyti.ms/2Z63Hd4

The Inanity of Zoom School Suspensions

Disciplinary action is often needless and discriminatory. The patchwork of in-person and virtual schooling is making things worse.

By Aaricka Washington

Ms. Washington is an education reporter.

I’m going to be honest: I didn’t know what I was doing.

There I was, a 22-year-old standing at the front of a classroom of lower-income elementary students in southwest Houston with only one month of training and an undergraduate degree in journalism. But I was a young, Black woman and in interviews I had shown a clear passion for helping Black and brown children succeed — which made me a Teach for America darling.

And I felt somewhat anchored by Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion” books, a manual championed by many education reformers, which offered techniques for gaining the compliance of every student in the classroom. I just had to follow its “rules of classroom management.” In the early months, nothing made me happier than when my students stood in a straight line with their hands behind their back. This rigid leadership was intended to help them close the achievement gap. But moments of full compliance were fleeting, and suspensions were commonplace.

When I sent one of my brightest second-grade boys to the office after a fight, he ended up suspended and came back days later a different child. He left the school soon afterward. The problem, I learned, was that discipline and punishment came before relationship building.

Students and educators are beginning the school year this fall under unheard-of circumstances as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. And I am gripped by the fear that aggressive school discipline is only going to get worse.

Some cases of harsh disciplinary actions have already made news. In May, a Michigan judge sent a 15 year-old Black girl with a learning disability in to a juvenile detention center because she did not do her homework, a violation of her probation. In Sacramento, Calif., a rising fourth-grader’s email privileges were briefly suspended after she was accused of having “bombarded the district’s tech support department with requests.”

In this moment of crisis, rather than reflexively devolving into punitive tactics, educators can radically shift their mind- set on classroom behavior and particularly how they treat marginalized students. Subini Annamma, an associate professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, is doing research on students who have been suspended from the San Francisco Unified School District to ask them about their experiences.

The district was recently singled out for review by the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education for having an overrepresentation of Black students and of Black students in the special education category of emotional disability who have been suspended. (According to the Office of Civil Rights data, while 16.3 percent of Black students had disabilities in the district 62.4 percent of Black students with Limited English Proficiency or disability status receive more than one out-of-school suspension.)

Disabled or not, having many disciplinary actions can be the first step in a path that can lead students to juvenile correctional facilities.

“I think educators need to constantly ask themselves, ‘Is this worth getting my kid in trouble for?’” Ms. Annamma told me. “‘Is this what I want to give of my autonomy as a teacher?’”

As schools prepare to become even more regimented by implementing protocols to prevent the spread of the virus, discipline may only grow more intense. According to Chalkbeat, in some Texas school districts, intentionally spitting, sneezing or coughing on a peer could be treated as assault.

In Shelby County, Tennessee, students will not be expected to wear uniforms, but they are expected to look “presentable regardless of the location in which learning occurs,” according to the existing dress code. “Repeat offenders” will be subject to suspension.

Dan Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, told me he is already finding huge discrepancies in the discipline data from large school districts.

“I’m just worried that we’re going to see a major upswing in things like referrals to police or suspensions,” Mr. Losen said. “I can imagine the administrators and staff either calling the cops more or suspending more often because even minor violations now have, at least in theory, a health risk.”

Elizabeth Hanif, a high school math teacher in Long Island, said some Zoom class rules she found online seemed unnecessary and would only exacerbate the problems with the virtual schooling. Attempting to establish rules on your own as a teacher doesn’t change a child’s behavior in substantial ways, she said. Having a relationship with them does.

“The goal is for our students to learn,” Ms. Hanif said.

Joseph D. Nelson, an education researcher whose research at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College focuses on Black boyhood, told me that among the students he taught before the pandemic, “most of the boys were high performing,” but “bored with their other classes. They were fulfilling teachers’ expectations of them by acting out.”

Mr. Nelson says educators can use strategies like getting to know a student’s interests by intentionally forming interpersonal bonds or going beyond school curriculum to meet a student’s learning needs. That, naturally, may require more institutional investment — a different but overlapping challenge for American schools that were already overwhelmed and are now wrestling with a hodgepodge of remote work and physical returns to campus.

Amid this pandemic, survival — just trying to find ways to make schooling work from week to week — may be the best some districts can do. The last thing they should do, then, is further punish the students who for too long faced needless discipline.

I will never stop thinking about the many dozens of students I taught before becoming a reporter. When I think about those few years, I don’t think of all the strict programming I originally tried to enforce. I think all of the things my children actually taught me, a naïve, 20-something: about my Blackness, about teaching without controlling, about the need to break rigid rules and, eventually, fix this broken education system.

Aaricka Washington (@aarickawash) is an education reporter.

NYTimes.com: The Trouble With Empathy

By Molly Worthen

Contributing Opinion Writer

September 4, 2020

When my daughter started remote kindergarten last month, the schedule sent to parents included more than reading, math, art and other traditional subjects. She’ll also have sessions devoted to “social and emotional learning.” Themes range from listening skills and reading nonverbal cues to how to spot and defuse bullying.

As millions of students start the school year at home, staring at glowing tablets, families worry that they will miss out on the intangible lessons in mutual understanding that come with spending hours a day with kids and adults outside their own household. We want children to grasp perspectives of people different from themselves. Yet in recent years, empathy — whether we can achieve it; whether it does the good we think — has become a vexed topic.

While teachers attempt to teach empathy through screens, the national context has become complicated in the months since the police killing of George Floyd. “Because our white leaders lack compassion and empathy, Black people continue to die,” wrote a columnist in The Chicago Sun-Times. When Joe Biden posted a video declaring that “the pain is too intense for one community to bear alone,” journalists called the message an effort to “project empathy” — while activists said empathy was not enough.

At the Republican National Convention, Ja’Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to President Trump, assured the audience that the president is empathizer in chief. “I just wish everyone would see the deep empathy he shows the families whose loved ones were killed due to senseless violence,” Mr. Smith said.

Few would quarrel with a kindergarten teacher’s noble efforts to teach listening skills to 5-year-olds. But as my daughter and her classmates get older, they will run into thornier dilemmas, our era’s version of old questions: Are some divides too great for common humanity to bridge? When we attempt to step into the shoes of those very different from us, do we do more harm than good? At the same time, trends in American education have worked at cross-purposes, nurturing social and emotional learning in some ways, hampering it in others.

Our capacity to see one another as fellow humans, to connect across differences, is the foundation of a liberal pluralist society. Yet skeptics say that what seems like empathy often may be another form of presumption, condescension or domination. In his 2016 book “Against Empathy,” the psychologist Paul Bloom argued that empathy can cloud rational judgment and skews toward people “who are close to us, those who are similar to us and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary.” The scholar and activist Bell Hooks put the matter more starkly. White desire to feel Black experience is predatory, exploitative, “eating the Other,” she wrote.

It’s impossible to perfectly inhabit another person’s experience. The important question is the value of the effort, and whether it leaves us separated by an asymptote or a chasm. Can a straight TV writer create an authentic gay sitcom character? If an author of European descent writes a novel from the perspective of Indigenous people, is it an empathic journey, or an imperialist incursion? “I don’t want to throw out what empathy is trying to do,” Alisha Gaines, a professor of African-American literature at Florida State University, told me. “I’m very critical of it though. Empathy has to be considered in the context of institutions and power.”

Ms. Gaines has devoted much of her scholarship to interrogating well-meaning white attempts at empathy for the Black experience, from the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book “Black Like Me,” an account of his project to pass as a Black man on a trip through the Deep South, to a modern re-enactment of the Underground Railroad — whose organizers promised “empathy to the extreme,.” Ms. Gaines said: “If for 90 minutes I run around and look for the lantern in the window, what do I take from this into my everyday life? This is playing a slave, not an enslaved person. The humanity gets evacuated out of it.”

Yet, as a literature professor, she wants students to see books as passageways to experiences unlike their own. “I love books because I’m learning something about people I didn’t understand. I’m connecting,” Ms. Gaines told me. “I wasn’t reflected in books I read as a kid. I understood myself through ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Little Women’ — little Black kids often have to understand themselves through white protagonists. At the same time, for me as a little girl reading ‘Anne of Green Gables,’ as much as I saw myself in her precociousness and her deep feeling, I also knew there wasn’t something speaking exactly to me. It was not a perfect mirror. We want to connect to the material on an emotional register and make space for the fact that each story tells a particular story.”

The impulse to participate in the feelings of another may be biological, rooted in our neurology. In the 19th-century German philosophers wrote of Einfühlung, or “in-feeling” — first translated in 1909 as the new English word “empathy.” They did not mean simulating someone else’s feelings, but projecting your own sentiments and memories in the course of an aesthetic or emotional experience, mingling your consciousness with the thing you are contemplating — whether it is a crying child, Picasso’s “Guernica” or a howling mountain landscape.

In the hands of the social scientists who rule our own time, empathy has become one piece of “emotional intelligence,” a term coined in the 1960s and developed by the psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. The journalist Daniel Goleman popularized that phrase in his 1995 best seller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” which argued that focusing on emotional skills would reduce school violence and equip students for greater success in life. Research has shown that these capacities are at least as important for long-term happiness and economic security as “hard” skills like reading and math.

In 2004, Illinois became the first state to adopt standards from preschool through high school for social and emotional learning, or SEL. Since then, anti-bullying workshops, classroom rules stressing compassion and wall charts of “feeling words” and “emoji meters” have become more common in schools nationally. “The overwhelming majority of educators and parents acknowledge that teaching children SEL skills is critical,” Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told me. “At the other end, in corporate America, employers are looking for people who have these skills.”

But the colorful classroom posters and the drive for data through “social-emotional competencies” student assessments — not necessarily bad things in themselves — risk reducing our idea of empathy to yet another job skill. The mania for standardized testing that followed the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act has further hampered teachers’ best and oldest tool for developing emotional understanding: the study of literature.

“I really do believe literature is an empathy tool, and reading literature widely can actually make you an empathetic person,” Sarah Levine, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, told me. In many classrooms, the structure of standardized tests, especially multiple-choice questions and narrow essay rubrics, pushes teachers to drill students on finding arguments and literary devices rather than encouraging them to reflect on their own emotional response. “The standardized testing movement reduces literary reading to fact-finding,” Ms. Levine said.

She recently completed a study of a century of New York Regents exams and found that from the 2000s onward, “the reader disappeared from the questions that these tests are asking students. The reader is being asked to figure out what the central idea of the text is, as opposed to being asked to talk about how a text made them see something differently, or sympathize with someone,” she told me.

“We have to ask: Is this the kind of reading we want kids to do? It makes kids really dislike reading. That doesn’t mean we don’t read critically, but we should be using some of that critical and interpretive firepower on political speeches, political tweets, things that demand attention to the way people are using language because they have immediate impact on us as citizens of the world. We should use fiction for empathy, aesthetic pleasure, examining ethical dilemmas and just the experience of escaping.”

Ms. Levine taught high school English on the South Side of Chicago before Stanford. She said that despite the life of privilege she sees around her now, “the danger we’re exposing students to in English classrooms is just as bad for kids in Palo Alto as for kids in Chicago with many fewer resources. We’re teaching them that literature is not for them, because they aren’t a part of what they read. I don’t mean because they feel, ‘I don’t see Black and brown faces in my literature,’ but ‘I’m supposed to write an argument about a motif,’ and not do what kids do outside of the classroom: read and enjoy the experience.”

Emerson Holloway, an English major at Oberlin College in Ohio, read a lot on her own to make up for the fact that in high school, she didn’t always have “the opportunity to connect and empathize with characters,” she told me.

At Oberlin, she helps facilitate a student group called Barefoot Dialogues, which invites students to discuss a text or work of art over a home-cooked meal in order to “engage in trust and vulnerability to make connections across differences,” she said.

She acknowledged that in academia, empathy across identity lines has become controversial, and it’s crucial to “know your own boundaries,” she said. “You can ask, ‘What’s the point if we’re all so different? I’ll never be able to truly understand,’ and that’s true to an extent.”

Yet the effort to understand feels more important now than ever, she said. When Covid-19 hit in March, Barefoot Dialogues switched to Zoom meetings; its leaders are hoping for a hybrid of in-person and remote conversation this fall.

The college students I interviewed for this story stressed the role of empathy in firing up their curiosity, critical thinking and self-interrogation. “People often dismiss emotion as a weakness,” Andie Horowitz, a political science major at the University of Michigan, told me. “But a certain level of emotion makes you interested in something, wanting to find the truth.”

She explained how her professor in a course on gender and the law led students in a deep dive into the lives of the individuals in cases they studied. “When you understand the people behind the movement, it becomes so much more personal,” she said. “That’s where empathy comes into critical thinking and being motivated to learn more.”

This fall, the sight of students of all ages squirming in front of iPads — struggling to learn about themselves and each other through apps and spotty Wi-Fi — drives home the urgency of social and emotional learning. But empathetic education was under attack long before Covid-19 hit. The desiccation of great books in the hands of testing bureaucrats and the politicization of literature in university classrooms is not a neatly left-wing or right-wing assault. It is a collective failure of confidence in our teachers and students. “When we think our students can’t do something, we’re done. Pack it up,” Ms. Gaines, the professor at Florida State, told me. “Given the opportunity, and the space to be vulnerable and space to say they don’t understand and don’t know, lots of growth can happen.”

This is the gift of liberal education: the invitation to read a book and think about both the variety and the common threads of human experience across time, space and culture. “Empathy extends beyond trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes,” said Ms. Holloway, the student at Oberlin. “Success is not part of that definition, really. The act of listening is a form of that empathy. You’re willing to attempt to understand.” Only by constantly making that attempt — however imperfect — can we learn empathy’s hazards, and its power.

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America,” an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.