The gilded age of narcissism

To feel empathy for another person doesn't require that you like or agree with them. It simply means you acknowledge they have emotions as well about the matter between you, and that their thoughts and feelings are as weighty to them as yours are to you.

It's only April and we've already had three throwbacks to the era of Jim Crow: the OU frat bus, happily belting out racist chants (Oklahoma); the discovery of racist behaviors and protocols in Ferguson's law enforcement system (Missouri); and the shooting of an African American man, Walter Scott, by former police officer Michael Slager (South Carolina). 

Where has the majority of words and energy gone? 

• Beauton Gilbow, the SAE house mother caught on video chanting racist slurs, lamented to news cameras that her way of life was ending. Fifteen years she'd been house mom at SAE and now she had to move out. What heartbreak! And such inconvenience.

• Parents of the two bus chant "leaders," the Rice and Pettit families moved like PR firms to pony up eloquent apologies, then begged for privacy so their families could "heal," never mind that the chant was an obscenity to African American members of the OU community. The world at large was still processing how two college men in the year 2015 could even chant such songs without qualm.

• Former Officer Slager's mom shook her head in TV news interviews, lamenting her son wouldn't be in the delivery room to see his child born, never mind that Walter Scott will be permanently absent from his family's big events. 

• Perhaps the most outrageous was Ferguson's clerk of court, Mary Ann Twitty, who made the hyperbolic equation that being exposed for circulating racist emails felt like a sexual assault. "I'm a good person," she insisted, "and I feel like I've been raped."

We are mere props in the movie of her life
The fact is Twitty has experienced neither racism nor rape. If she had, she'd have never made that analogy — nor found those jokes funny. But as with the others, her account of herself does point to a startling lack of empathy. Sure, there's been some public, scripted chest-beating but none of them have asked humble questions to learn the full scope of what they'd done. Their concerns have been for themselves, nobody else. Being exposed simply made such individuals even more self-absorbed — and that is its own set of red flags.