I’ve heard calls around our campus and community about a need for empathy and compassion, and I am sure you have as well. I hear people shouting and rallying, “We must love and support one another.” Others state how high levels of empathy in our citizens are crucial to a “good” society, whatever this means. But I think the word is thrown around with little thought to how significant an endeavor it is to empathize, especially with someone who is from a completely different background than ourselves. This is where the issue lies. Calls for empathy will go unanswered and largely unfulfilled if we first do not understand the barriers to empathizing with people different from ourselves.

Having empathy entails having an ability to hear out another person’s struggles and emotions and place yourself in their shoes. If I am empathizing with another person’s pain, I can stand under a cloud of rain with them and maybe even be able to imagine how this pain could apply to my own life and circumstances. But practicing empathy might come with its own biases.

According to psychologist Paul Bloom, it’s much easier to be empathetic towards those who look like us, with whom we share an ethnic or national background or whom we find attractive. Second, we are more prone to being empathetic with individuals as opposed to communities. Statistics or numbers that show the suffering or plight of another community does not incite empathy. When I read Bloom’s argument, I wanted to jump to the defense of empathy. I wanted to say, “This cannot be true.” But I realized that even though emotions are stirred inside me when I read articles about the experiences of young black men fearing gun violence and police brutality or refugees fleeing from Syria, those emotions do not encompass empathy. If we’re strictly speaking in terms of feelings, I might not be able to truly empathize with any of these communities at any point in my life. If any one of these individuals walked into an Uncle Joe’s office and talked to me about their story, I believe that I could hear them with compassion, but I’m still less likely to empathize because we do not share the same culture, language or skin color. So, does this mean that Paul Bloom’s argument against empathy has some sort of saliency?

I’ve associated empathy with morality and goodness ever since I learned about what it meant, but now I’m not so sure. I wonder now if Paul Bloom is right, and empathy acts as a spotlight on a stage, highlighting the experiences of one person while discounting those of many others. But if not empathy, then what? And if empathy, how can we minimize the bias of it?

From my experiences on campus, I have a partial response that might not even be the answer. And even that is something each of us has heard so many times: diversity. I want to expand on existing calls for greater diversity in the student body one step further. I believe diversity (in gender, opinion, experience, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion) needs to be selected for in organizations that provide crucial services to students—Uncle Joe’s, S.A.R.A.H., Emergency Support Team, resident advisors, Washington University Student Associates and Student Union, among others.

I can only personally speak for my experiences as a part of Uncle Joe’s, but I’m sure at least some of this can be generalized to other organizations. If Uncle Joe’s is advertising themselves as an organization that is “Here to listen,” then it must not do so halfway. Selecting for a natural empathetic quality in their counselors is also not enough to accomplish the group’s goals. If an increasingly diverse student population is ready to walk to in to talk to Joe’s about their experiences, then the organization needs to be prepared for this and recruit diverse counselors. With increasingly diverse ranks, counselors will be able to approach conversations with other students, as well as offer resources, with greater empathy. In my opinion, this is currently not the case. However, many entities besides just Uncle Joe’s could stand to look within their ranks and evaluate how diversity impacts the services they provide. If that means evaluating if and how your organization provides a welcoming space free of bias or discrimination, then I encourage you to do so.

I do not know if I’m ready to take the step to say that empathy is a completely bad thing, but I am willing to speak out for the bias inherent in being empathetic. If anything, ignore buzz words in this article like “diversity” and “empathy”—just think about the fact that you just need to be like another person to be able to step into their shoes easily. And then, go from there.