[technopath]

The empathy you and everyone else are talking about is not what a clinical psychologist / psychotherapist / competent psychiatrist means by empathy. Yours is more akin to what they would call sympathy / pity / compassion.

It's unfortunate, because while I agree with you, the lesser-known version of empathy is actually useful with respect to dealing with pain. The characteristic in common is a sharing of emotion, but therapist empathy also includes intelligent analysis to overcome things like racial prejudice, dialog with the recipient to check for understanding, and well it's basically just hard work that pays decently if you're good at it.

It doesn't scale though, it's really only good on a 1-1 basis but some group situations can work. Supposedly parents are supposed to do it naturally with their children but everyone is so self-centered these days that I never see it.

[yummyfajitas]

I think cognitive empathy (knowing what others feel) is the technical term for what you call "therapist empathy", as opposed to affective empathy (feeling what others feel).

Cognitive empathy would be more about recognizing that the pain felt by racists is real pain. Of course, then an unpleasant moral dilemma arises - should we take such pain seriously? Traditional appeals to empathy say no, since we have no affective empathy for racists (they are far more out-group than blacks). But is that correct?

[technopath]

Hmmm, ok, so I think cognitive empathy probably subsumes affective empathy, with safeguards to stop you from getting overwhelmed by it. [edit: Or at least therapists do both of these things.]

Good question. I think therapists have an obligation to treat racists without prejudice. I've read a few papers written about the treatment of repulsive clients. Many times just by listening to and validating pain, the pain will shift and the defense - which may well be racism - will fall apart. So then I think the question is, is malignant racism only ever acceptable as a symptom of a deeper problem? I probably would be okay if the answer here was yes. (Unlike homosexuality, for example, because unlike racism, even if you construed homosexuality to be a defense, it's much harder to show that it's an unhealthy defense that actually hurts anyone.)