patriarchal power will not be dismantled by empathy alone

You may have noticed some women black out their profile picture today as a solidarity tactic. 

Here is a powerful critique of this tactic from Harsha Walia: 

"'Female blackout' to protest domestic violence is today. I refuse to turn my profile pic to a black square. I refuse to disappear as part of some bizarre awareness project that furthers the very goals that patriarchy intends - submission and disappearance. Can we please stop with these die-ins, disappearings, becoming faceless trends? They arent only disempowering, they are a strategic mistake. Power, and certainly patriarchal power, will not be dismantled by humanizing empathy alone."

learning empathy through a video game

I have blogged repeatedly here about empathy experiments, and my doubts about them. But what about empathy games? A recent study showed that kids who played a video game that taught empathy skills actually enhanced their empathy related neural networks. Given that even my college students have trouble naming potential emotions when I teach them non-violent communication, games like these that help us listen and connect well with the emotions of others seem more useful to me than experiments where we pretend to be others. Check out the trailer for the video game used in this study, below.