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I wanted to highlight everything in this book. At once a balm to the spirit and a spirited rebuttal of the failings of the emotional systems that underpin white supremacist thinking and discriminatory and racist systems, The Empathy Gap was the book I needed. It's an easy read with hard truths that suggests how we can move forward in community and honouring our shared humanity.
The Empathy Gap: Description and Chapter Listing
Here's the book description from author Tammy Triolo's website:
"The Empathy Gap examines how white supremacy has reshaped our emotional lives, eroding empathy, distorting connection, and normalizing emotional disconnection in ways many of us have never named. Through fifteen patterns, the book explores how empathy is suppressed, extracted, or denied both toward others and within ourselves. It invites readers to reflect on what supremacy has taught them not to feel, and offers a path toward reclaiming empathy as a daily, embodied practice."
And here's the chapter listing:
Prologue: Understanding Empathy
Chapter 1: Emotional Invalidation
Chapter 2: Disconnection from Impact
Chapter 3: Fragile Self Protection
Chapter 4: Efficiency Over Humanity
Chapter 5: Hierarchies of Worthiness
Chapter 6: Suppression of Grief and Rage
Chapter 7: Demand for Emotional Conformity
Chapter 8: Policing Empathy
Chapter 9: Conditional Compassion
Chapter 10: Fear of Emotional Accountability
Chapter 11: Emotional Extraction
Chapter 12: Normalization of Emotional Detachment
Chapter 13: Monopolization of Victimhood
Chapter 14: Disdain for Vulnerability
Chapter 15: Institutionalized Gaslighting
Chapter 16: The Invitation to Empathy
Chapter 17: A Love Letter To Us
Chapter 18: The Path Forward
Epilogue
An Easy Read
This is a good book. It's well-written and flows easily from one thought to the other, carrying you with it. As you'll see in the chapter listing above, the first 15 chapters identify the titular empathy gap, seeing where it shows up in who deserves it, how it's policed, gaslighting, suppression of valid feelings and much more.
The last 3 chapters turn to an alternative, ending with a path forward. They offer an invitation to what the author calls kinship, where we leave old ideas behind and enter a new era of community based on embodied empathy.
Finally, the author urges white folks to reflect and Black folks to reclaim so we can all step into a new future building a bridge of empathy to bring us together.
Challenging and Hopeful
I'm not sure how Tammy Triolo does it, but this book is hard hitting without being hard. That said, however you are racialised there are ideas that will challenge you. I think that's a good thing.
Somehow, the author manages to leave us with hope, and if you accept her challenge, there's a better world ahead for all of us where empathy doesn't have to be earned, and where we reconnect with ourselves and each other.
I'll keep The Empathy Gap on my digital shelf because I know I'll be reading it again. Highly recommended.
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10 Standout Quotes
I really can't do better than the author's own words so here are just a few of the quotes that made me think:
"This book isn’t just about racism. It’s about the emotional architecture that made racism sustainable. In order to enslave human beings, white people had to kill something in themselves: their empathy."
"This isn't just about unlearning racism. It's about dismantling the internal ranking system that asks,“Who deserves care?” and replacing it with a more radical question: “Why did we ever believe some people didn’t?”"
"Healing the empathy gap requires making space for the full, messy, necessary range of human feeling not just the feelings that comfort, but the feelings that confront. We need a world where Black people can cry without being judged, where Black people can rage without being feared, where emotion is not pathologized but honored. We need a world where white people stop controlling the room and start sitting in it fully, humbly, honestly."
"Some white people want to care. Some do care. But their empathy has been so shaped by defensiveness, emotional entitlement, and fear that it arrives tangled in self-protection. They cry, but it centers them. They listen, but only to correct. They relate, but only on their terms."
"But what if compassion wasn’t earned? What if we felt for people simply because they’re human not because they’re performing the version of humanity we prefer?"
"nobody escapes the damage of white supremacy culture. Black people bear the brunt of it — through violence, erasure, and exhaustion. But white people carry its ghost — through emotional detachment, disconnection, and the gnawing fear that something is missing."
"White victimhood, then, is not just an emotional reflex — it is a cultural weapon. It creates a moral equivalence between discomfort and injustice, making it nearly impossible to challenge racism without being accused of causing harm."
"I am not calling you to guilt. Guilt centers you. I am calling you to responsibility, to a moral maturity that white supremacy has trained you to avoid."
"We come from people who knew how to listen with more than their ears, who sang to keep memory alive, who hummed lullabies braided with grief and grit, who passed down strength wrapped in gentleness and called it love. This is our inheritance. It is our legacy."
"The work ahead is not simply about dismantling structures. It is about healing the emotional fractures that have kept us from truly seeing and being with one another."
Thanks for reading,
Sharon
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I am an anti-racism educator and activist, the author of “I’m Tired of Racism”, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.
© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2025. All Rights Reserved. This newsletter is published on beehiiv (affiliate link).